PHPMailer sending e-mails with the warning: This message may not have been sent by: [email protected] Learn more Report phishing

Question

I am using PHPMailer to send automated e-mails from my website and while testing, I noticed that all e-mails sent by php mailer are generating the following warning on the recipients end:

This message may not have been sent by: [email protected] Learn more Report phishing

I was wondering if there is a way to avoid this?

PHP Mailer code:

//mail functions
require("mailer/class.phpmailer.php");
require("mailer/class.smtp.php");
require("mailer/class.pop3.php");

$mail = new PHPMailer();
$mail->IsSMTP();  
$mail->Host = "relay-hosting.secureserver.net";
$mail->Port = 25;  
$mail->IsHTML(true);
$mail->Username = "[email protected]";  // SMTP username
$mail->Password = "pass"; // SMTP password

$mail->From = "[email protected]";
$mail->FromName = "FOO";
$mail->AddAddress("[email protected]", "WIDB");
$mail->AddReplyTo("[email protected]");
//$mail->AddAddress("[email protected]");                  // name is optional

$mail->WordWrap = 50;                                 // set word wrap to 50 characters
//$mail->AddAttachment("/var/tmp/file.tar.gz");         // add attachments
//$mail->AddAttachment("/tmp/image.jpg", "new.jpg");    // optional name
$mail->IsHTML(true);                                  // set email format to HTML

$mail->Subject = 'Foo - Transaction Receipt';
$mail->Body    = $message;
$mail->AltBody = "nothing";

//send mail
$mail->Send();

I am using GMail and I have SMTP enabled...

Answer 1

You can either set up google apps for your site and get a [email protected] gmail account (more info here it's free), or You will need to set up an e-mail address on your current server that is [email protected] and use that as the $mail->from address.

Your E-Mail recipients are receiving the message because you are telling google to send an e-mail from your server, and then you are telling them that the mail is coming from gmail, which it isn't, it's coming from your personal server. Since the from address and your server address don't match, they flag it as spam. This is googles way of preventing spam, to them it would be the same if you put $mail->from([email protected]). The e-mail would still send, but your domain name does not match the @ address.