PHPMailer v. mail() for a simple Contact Form

Question

I am new to PHP, but have a decent grasp of things (have not learned classes yet).

The question:

Which to choose? PHPMailer or mail() for my

Answer 1

This will maybe not really answer all your questions, but it won't hurt either, I guess...

Whatever you want to do, I would not go with mail() : sending a mail is not such an easy task, and using an existing library/framework will always be a good idea : it will solve many problems you probably have not even thought about -- even if you don't need to send lots of mails.

About your specific questions, maybe other answers will say something else and/or get your more informations, but any "good" library created to send mails should deal with those kind of problems... Else, you should probably search for another library ^^

Still, testing a couple of dumb non-addresses will allow you to be 100% sure ;-)

Another solution to be quite sure is to check the source of the library ;-)

In the source of version 2.2.1, you'll find stuff like this :

class.phpmailer.php, function AddAnAddress, line 413, you'll see this :

if (!self::ValidateAddress($address)) {
  $this->SetError($this->Lang('invalid_address').': '. $address);
  if ($this->exceptions) {
    throw new phpmailerException($this->Lang('invalid_address').': '.$address);
  }
  echo $this->Lang('invalid_address').': '.$address;
  return false;
}

And it seems this function is used by the other functions that add an address... So, I suppose there's some kind of email-addresses validation ;-)
That'll answer at least one of your questions ^^

PHPMailer is not the only solution that exists, btw ; there are plenty of others, like, for instance :

• Zend_Mail
• Rmail for PHP (Formerly known as HTML Mime Mail)
• Swift Mailer