Error handling with PHPMailer

Question

I'm trying to use PHPMailer for a small project, but I'm a bit confused about error handling with this software. Hoping someone has experience with it. When I've set up an email and I use:

$result = $mail->Send();  if(!$result) {     // There was an error     // Do some error handling things here } else {     echo "Email successful"; } 

Which works fine, more or less. The problem is when there's an error, PHPMailer also seems to echo the error out, so if there's a problem, it just sends that info directly to the browser, essentially breaking any error handling I"m trying to do.

Is there a way to silence these messages? Its not throwing an exception, its just printing out the error, which in my test case is:

invalid address: @invalid@email You must provide at least one recipient email address. 

Its meant to be an error, but it should be residing in $mail->ErrorInfo; not being echo'd out by the software.

Answer 1

PHPMailer uses Exceptions. Try to adopt the following code:

require_once '../class.phpmailer.php';  $mail = new PHPMailer(true); //defaults to using php "mail()"; the true param means it will throw exceptions on errors, which we need to catch  try {   $mail->AddReplyTo('[email protected]', 'First Last');   $mail->AddAddress('[email protected]', 'John Doe');   $mail->SetFrom('[email protected]', 'First Last');   $mail->AddReplyTo('[email protected]', 'First Last');   $mail->Subject = 'PHPMailer Test Subject via mail(), advanced';   $mail->AltBody = 'To view the message, please use an HTML compatible email viewer!'; // optional - MsgHTML will create an alternate automatically   $mail->MsgHTML(file_get_contents('contents.html'));   $mail->AddAttachment('images/phpmailer.gif');      // attachment   $mail->AddAttachment('images/phpmailer_mini.gif'); // attachment   $mail->Send();   echo "Message Sent OK\n"; } catch (phpmailerException $e) {   echo $e->errorMessage(); //Pretty error messages from PHPMailer } catch (Exception $e) {   echo $e->getMessage(); //Boring error messages from anything else! } 

Answer 2

You can get more info about the error with the method $mail->ErrorInfo. For example:

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

This is an alternative to the exception model that you need to active with new PHPMailer(true). But if can use exception model, use it as @Phil Rykoff answer.

This comes from the main page of PHPMailer on github https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer.