PHP Secure Area - Email Features

If you wish to send out your emails using SMTP email service rather than using the standard PHP sendmail function then this is where you set up the SMTP details. With some hosts, using the standard PHP sendmail function is not always reliable, but an external SMTP service can be much more reliable.

Click on the button "Click to use SMTP" to show the set up details.

The details will vary depending on the SMTP hosting service that you use. Note "Debug" allows you to display debug messages which is useful when you are setting up the details. Once you have entered in the details, click on "Email" in the main menu and do an email test.

If your application requires emails to be sent out from your web server for such things as sending download information, login information and so on, then you will need to set up some email accounts on your hosting system.

Log into your hosting account where you set up your databases and administer your web hosting.. Normally this will be using cpanel which will look something like this:

You should see a section identified as "Mail".

You need to set up an email account, so click on the link for "Email accounts" which will take you to a display where you create an account with a user name and password for your domain.

Enter in an email account name. For my applications I normally create an admin account so this will become admin@myservername.com. You also need to enter in a password which you should should keep a record of.

Now that you have created your account, your hosting will provide you with a link to a web mail client where you can login and then see your emails. You may want to send a test email to your account from hotmail or yahoo just to see how it works.

Now that you have an email account set up, you can use this in your PHP applications.

There is one other step that you may want to do, and that is to redirect this email to one of your other accounts. This will mean that when someone emails admin@yourservername.com, it will appear in your hotmail or yahoo account.

To do this, in cpanel under the "Mail" section, click on the link called "Forwarders". Click on the button called "Add Forwarders" which will take you a page that will look something like:

In the "Address to Forward" box enter the address that you just created and in the "Destination" box, enter in your main email account which might be a yahoo or hotmail account. There shouldn't be any need to change any of the options. Then click on the "Add Forwarder" button.

Now if send an email to the account that you have just created, that email should pop up in the the destination email account.