Why am i getting null value for the $mail object? - php

Question

I am using a code to find the individuals that check in late and send emails to them. also I find those that haven't come at all and send emails to them too. However, it is not working. I get the names and emails correctly, but the $mail object is null, and I don't understand why.
This is my code:
mail_sender.php (this is what i call to send the message)
<?php
function custom_mail($name, $surname, $email, $message, $subject){
//$mail->SMTPDebug = 3; // Enable verbose debug output
require './PHPMailer-master/PHPMailerAutoload.php';
$mail = new PHPMailer();
global $mail;
var_dump($mail);
$mail->isSMTP(); // Set mailer to use SMTP
$mail->Host = 'smtp.gmail.com;'; // Specify main and backup SMTP servers
$mail->SMTPAuth = true; // Enable SMTP authentication
$mail->Username = '****'; // SMTP username
$mail->Password = '****'; // SMTP password
$mail->SMTPSecure = 'tls'; // Enable TLS encryption, `ssl` also accepted
$mail->Port = ****; // TCP port to connect to
$mail->From = '****';
$mail->FromName = '****';
$mail->addAddress($email, $name." ".$surname); // Add a recipient
$mail->addCC('****');
$mail->isHTML(true); // Set email format to HTML
$mail->Subject = $subject;
$mail->Body = ucwords($name).' '.ucwords($surname).'! <br />'.$message;
$mail->AltBody = 'This is the body in plain text for non-HTML mail clients';
//
if(!$mail->send()) {
echo 'email -> '.$email.' name -> '.$name.' surname -> '.$surname.'<br />';
echo 'Mailer Error: ' . $mail->ErrorInfo;
}
else {
$mail->ClearAllRecipients(); //clears the list of recipients to avoid other people from getting this email
}
}
?>

Answer 1

I think this may be your problem:
$mail = new PHPMailer();
global $mail;
var_dump($mail);
This just doesn't look like a good idea - if you already have a variable called $mail defined globally, it may overwrite your PHPMailer instance, making it null. Change the order to this:
global $mail;
$mail = new PHPMailer();
var_dump($mail);
I don't see that there's much reason to make this available globally at all - if you want to re-use the instance across multiple calls, this won't help - you should be declaring it statically to do that, like this:
static $mail;
if (!isset($mail)) {
$mail = new PHPMailer();
}
var_dump($mail);