Test sending emails in PHP with XAMPP and MailHog

Sending mail with PHP is easy. We can test it with a local SMTP server. MailHog is very useful for this purpose.

MailHog

MailHog is program that creates a local SMTP mail sever for testing purposes. Let’s see how to configure MailHog.

Download MailHog

You can download MailHog from here . https://github.com/mailhog/MailHog/releases/latest . For 64 bit windows look for MailHog_windows_amd64.exe and for 32 bit MailHog_windows_386.exe

Configure MailHog

Rename the downloaded file to mailhog.exe and put it in C:\mailhog folder. So, the path for Mailhog executable will be C:\mailhog\mailhog.exe. Now add this to environment path variable.

Now open command prompt and type mailhog to run the SMTP server.

Open http://localhost:8025/ in your browser. You will see all the emails here you sent using PHP.

Update PHP configuration

Open php.ini and search for mail function. Set SMTP=127.0.0.1 and smtp_port=1025 in php.ini file.

[mail function]
; For Win32 only.
; http://php.net/smtp
SMTP=127.0.0.1
; http://php.net/smtp-port
smtp_port=1025

Update sendmail configuration

Open sendmail.ini from C:\xampp\sendmail\ directory and put smtp_server=127.0.0.1 and smtp_port=1025.

[sendmail]
smtp_server=127.0.0.1
smtp_port=1025

You can now use PHP’s mail() function to send email from your application.

Sending email

Now create a PHP file like the following

<?php

   $to = 'recipients@email-address.com';
   $subject = 'Hello from XAMPP!';
   $message = 'This is a Mailhog test';
   $headers = "From: your@email-address.com\r\n";

   if (mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers)) {
      echo "SUCCESS";
   } else {
      echo "ERROR";
}

When you run the file you will receive an email in the MailHog inbox.

This will also be helpful for local WordPress installation for resetting passwords.