Mailer Error: SMTP connect() failed in php mailer( https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/wiki/Troubleshooting)

Question

Here is code for sending email from localhost after i referred a lot from online.

html form:

<form method="post" action="email.php">
  Email: <input name="email" id="email" type="text" /><br />

  Message:<br />
  <textarea name="message" id="message" rows="15" cols="40"></textarea><br />

  <input type="submit" value="Submit" />
</form>

email.php:

<?php

// $email and $message are the data that is being
// posted to this page from our html contact form
$email = $_REQUEST['email'] ;
$message = $_REQUEST['message'] ;

require_once('class.phpmailer.php');
require 'PHPMailerAutoload.php';
require 'class.smtp.php';

$mail = new PHPMailer();
$body='hellooooo';
$mail->IsSMTP();

$mail->Host = "ssl://smtp.gmail.com"; // specify main and backup server

$mail->SMTPAuth = true; // turn on SMTP authentication

$mail->Username = "xxxx@gmail.com"; // SMTP username
$mail->Password = "zzz"; // SMTP password
$mailer->SMTPSecure = 'ssl';
$mailer->Port = 465;//587;
$mail->AddAddress("xxx", "xx");
$mail->SetFrom('xxx@gmail.com','xxxx');
$mail->WordWrap = 50;

$mail->IsHTML(true);

$mail->Subject = "You have received feedback from your website!";

$mail->MsgHTML($body);

if(!$mail->Send())
{
echo "Message could not be sent. <p>";
echo "Mailer Error: " . $mail->ErrorInfo;
exit;
}

echo "Message has been sent";
?>

so when i run my code it shows error like this,

Message could not be sent.

Mailer Error: SMTP connect() failed. https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/wiki/Troubleshooting

And i removed semicolon in this line ;extension=php_openssl.dll from the following files, and restart the xampp.

c/xampp/apache/bin/php.ini and c/xampp/php/php.ini

still stays same error..

Note: I m new to php, but i want to know particular this one and fix the problem. and I referred similar questions in stack, but it didn't help me,

Can anybody help me to fix this?

Thanks,

Answer 1

It looks like your credentials for connecting to your authentication has failed. I often send mail from my local and I found it that it's a LOT easier to use another SMTP than gmail, like mandrillapp, free until 12,000 mails. There are a lot of things that I don't understand in your code so I will share mine.

<?php 

require 'PHPMailer-master/PHPMailerAutoload.php';

$mail = new PHPMailer;
//$mail->SMTPDebug = 3;                               // Enable verbose debug output

$mail->isSMTP();                                      // Set mailer to use SMTP
$mail->Host = 'smtp.mandrillapp.com';  // Specify main and backup SMTP servers
$mail->SMTPAuth = true;                               // Enable SMTP authentication
$mail->Username = 'your@username.com';                 // SMTP username
$mail->Password = 'mandrilapp_will_give_you_a_password';                           // SMTP password
$mail->Port = 587;                                    // TCP port to connect to

$mail->From = 'your@email.com';
$mail->FromName = 'Test phpmailer';
$mail->addAddress('who_are_you_sending@to.com');               // Name is optional

$mail->isHTML(true);                                  // Set email format to HTML

$mail->Subject = 'Here is the subject';
$mail->Body    = 'This is the HTML message body <b>in bold!</b>';
$mail->AltBody = 'This is the body in plain text for non-HTML mail clients';

if(!$mail->send()) {
    echo 'Message could not be sent.';
    echo 'Mailer Error: ' . $mail->ErrorInfo;
} else {
    echo 'Message has been sent';
}

Be sure to have PHPMailer-master folder (you can download it from here) at the same level as your php file. This is how I link phpmailer. Hope it helps, if you have any questions, ask me!