Fatal Error in PHPMailer

Question

A beginner here.

I have already checked the forum to find out answers but I was not successful, other questions were specifically on some parts of PHPMailer but mine is more general. So I hope no one will mark my question as duplicate as I am in learning curve.

I am working on a PHP project. How it works is that the user goes to the page and writes some comments or issues in a form (like a text editor) and clicks on the send button. I should be able to receive his message to my email. I have set my Gmail account here for testing purposes but later it will be my real email with my own domain.

Here is the error that I am receiving when I run on local host:

Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'phpmailerException' with message 'Could not execute: /usr/sbin/sendmail' in C:\xampp\htdocs\pp\classes\class.phpmailer.php:1100 Stack trace: #0 C:\xampp\htdocs\pp\classes\class.phpmailer.php(1026): PHPMailer->sendmailSend('Date: Thu, 9 Oc...', '--b1_9ea0b33e3f...') #1 C:\xampp\htdocs\pp\classes\class.phpmailer.php(935): PHPMailer->postSend() #2

Here is the code I am using:

<?php 
require_once("../../classes/class.phpmailer.php");

if($_POST['mode']=='send'){

    $mail = new PHPMailer(true); // the true param means it will throw exceptions on errors, which we need to catch

    $mail->IsSendmail(); // telling the class to use SendMail transport

        //I assume this part is to make it run on linux base on Google search
    $body = "New Bug Report from ".$_SESSION['name']."\n".$_POST['bug'];
    $mail->AddReplyTo('mj@gmail.com', 'MJ Team');
    $mail->AddAddress(''.$_SESSION['email'].'', ''.$_SESSION['name'].'');
    $mail->SetFrom(mj@gmail.com', 'MJ Team');
    $mail->AddReplyTo('mj@gmail.com', 'MJ Team');
    $mail->Subject = 'New bug report for the portal';
    $mail->AltBody = 'To view the message, please use an HTML compatible email viewer!'; // optional - MsgHTML will create an alternate automatically
    $mail->MsgHTML($body);
    $mail->Send();

            //And I assume this part of the code makes it run on windows based on Google search
        $mail->IsSMTP();
        $mail->SMTPAuth = true;
        $mail->Host = "smtp.postmarkapp.com";
        $mail->Port = 26;
        $mail->Username = "MJ";
        $mail->Password = "MJ";
        $mail->SetFrom('mj@gmail.com', 'mj');
        $mail->Subject = "An email for test";
        $mail->AddAddress($address, $name);

    if($mail){
        $message = 'Thanks. Bug report successfully sent. We will get in touch if we have any more questions.';
        }
        else {
            echo "Mailer Error: " . $mail->ErrorInfo;
        }
}
?>

Just as extra information I was not able to find any user and pass for SMTP so I just filled with with my name which obviously shouldn't be right. Since I am beginner I appreciate any comments and suggestion code that might help me run my code.

Thank you!

Answer 1

Try this :

<?php 
session_start();

if(isset($_POST['mode']) && $_POST['mode']=='send' && 
   isset($_SESSION['email'], $_SESSION['name'])){

    require_once("PHPMailerAutoload.php");
    $mail = new PHPMailer(true);

    //Send mail using gmail
    $mail->IsSMTP(); // telling the class to use SMTP
    $mail->SMTPAuth = true; // enable SMTP authentication
    $mail->SMTPSecure = "ssl"; // sets the prefix to the servier
    $mail->Host = "smtp.gmail.com"; // sets GMAIL as the SMTP server
    $mail->Port = 465; // set the SMTP port for the GMAIL server
    $mail->Username = "mj@gmail.com"; // GMAIL username
    $mail->Password = "mypassword"; // GMAIL password

    //Typical mail data
    $mail->AddAddress($_SESSION['email'], $_SESSION['name']);
    $mail->SetFrom('mj@gmail.com', 'mj');
    $mail->Subject = "This is a test message";
    $mail->Body = "An email for test";

    try{
        $mail->Send();
        echo "Thanks. Bug report successfully sent.
              We will get in touch if we have any more questions!";
    } catch(Exception $e){
        //Something went bad
        echo "Mailer Error: - " . $mail->ErrorInfo;
    }
}else{
    echo 'missing required values!';
}

Answer 2

If all you want to do is send an email why not use the PHP Mail command (http://php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php)

replace your code with this:

$to      = 'mj@gmail.com';
$subject = 'the subject';
$message = 'New bug report for the portal';
$headers = 'From: mj@gmail.com' . "\r\n" .
    'Reply-To: mj@gmail.com' . "\r\n" .
    'X-Mailer: PHP/' . phpversion();

mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);