Should SMTP be used for contact forms?

Question

I understand SMTP is often used to send mail to client addresses, because the host may be considered spam and blocked. In this case, suppose I have a website with a few contact forms, that sends an email to the administrator's email account (eg. gmail). Because the email is sent to the admin, does SMTP have any benefits in reliability or security? Additionally, if the host sends email directly, does the host server need an 'email account'?

Answer 1

There is nothing particularly wrong with this approach. Many large frameworks and CMS systems use email as a way of contacting the admins for internal messages (software updates needed) or for contact form submissions from users.

If your framework has built-in API calls for transactional mailers, check those out - eg: Laravel recommends a couple of mail providers that already have API calls baked into the framework.

If you are using pure PHP, I can strongly recommend the excellent PHPMailer library over the built-in mail() function - PHPMailer is far easier to set up for SMTP.

The admin will need an account to send mail from, but if this is purely for site -> admin communication you can use the same gmail account for both the sending and receiving.

Note about gmail:

If you are going to use a gmail account to send, the account needs to have access for less secure apps enabled. You will also need to ensure that you don't annoy the Google admins with the volume of mail. Things like spam detection can be ignored since all the mail is going to one account and that account can simply whitelist the sending address.

Note about SMTP:

SMTP is generally secure enough for this sort of thing, as long as you use SMTP over SSL/TLS. Do not send mail to an SMTP server unencrypted as the password will also travel unencrypted and your account will be hacked quickly. Do not use port 25.