PHP: how to send email basics

Question

I\'m would like to use PHP to send email from my localhost to other people. What do I need to do that?

For example do I need to install mailserver? If I\'m not mistaken

Answer 1

The simple way is by using the mail() command. On Linux it's a pipe to sendmail binary and on Windows, I don't know, probably it use some Microsoft voodoo library.

Anyway, I strongly recommend to use phpMailer because it's a mature project, really stable, easy to setup, with a lot of features and it also includes an SMTP and IMAP client implementation, so absolutely cross-platform.

Anyway, you should consider to use anyway a local SMTP server as first hop to handle the mail queue in case of network failure.