how to send mail using phpmailer on xampp - php

Question

I have been trying to send a mail using php mailer on xampp and i do get this error saying
Message could not be sent. Mailer Error: The following From address failed: xxxx2#gmail.com : Called Mail() without being connected
please, i need help on how to fix this.
Here is my code;
<?php
require( 'class.phpmailer.php' );
$mail = new PHPMailer;
$mail->IsSMTP();
$mail->SMTPAuth = true;
$mail->Host = "tls://smtp.gmail.com";
$mail->Port = 25;
$mail->Username = "xxxx#gmail.com";
$mail->Password = "xxxxx";
//Sending the actual email
$mail->setFrom('xxxx2#gmail.com', 'Aaron');
$mail->addAddress('xxxx2#gmail.com', 'Aaron'); // Add a recipient
$mail->isHTML(false); // Set email format to HTML
$mail->Subject = 'Calculation form results from ';
$mail->Body = 'testing...';
if(!$mail->send()) {
echo 'Message could not be sent. ';
echo 'Mailer Error: ' . $mail->ErrorInfo;
exit;
}
?>

Answer 1

Literally copied from https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/blob/master/examples/gmail.phps
//Create a new PHPMailer instance
$mail = new PHPMailer;
//Tell PHPMailer to use SMTP
$mail->isSMTP();
//Set the hostname of the mail server
$mail->Host = 'smtp.gmail.com';
// use
// $mail->Host = gethostbyname('smtp.gmail.com');
// if your network does not support SMTP over IPv6
//Set the SMTP port number - 587 for authenticated TLS
$mail->Port = 587;
//Set the encryption system to use - ssl (deprecated) or tls
$mail->SMTPSecure = 'tls';
//Whether to use SMTP authentication
$mail->SMTPAuth = true;
//Username to use for SMTP authentication - use full email address for gmail
$mail->Username = "username#gmail.com";
//Password to use for SMTP authentication
$mail->Password = "yourpassword";
//Set who the message is to be sent from
$mail->setFrom('from#example.com', 'First Last');
//Set an alternative reply-to address
$mail->addReplyTo('replyto#example.com', 'First Last');
//Set who the message is to be sent to
$mail->addAddress('whoto#example.com', 'John Doe');

Answer 2

I tried with Composer and github, but couldn't get the latest version of phpmailer to work with my test php email through xampp. When I ran the program on localhost, it kept crashing out, as the email code was looking for the php mailer class.
So I went back to google, ignored composer, and downloaded a plain ordinary zip of php mailer 5.2.0, and extracted this zip directly into my 'websiteX' testing folder which is located in htdocs in xampp.
In my 'websiteX' folder I have my testmail.php file along with my phpmailer unzipped folder and it contains the class.phpmailer which actually works in my case.
I have spent a week faffing around, but now I have xampp php emails going to my test gmail account perfectly. I use chrome and notepad++ as well.
Funnily enough I had php emails with the php mail() command working too, although Gmail hard bounced 'em, which isnt great. The first thing I did last week was to get Mercury mail (included in xampp) working. I followed this link https://www.open-emr.org/wiki/index.php/Mercury_Mail_Configuration_in_Windows and managed to get xampp communicating with gmail which was great!
Good luck with your coding.