email - Should I use php mail function or phpmailer?

Question

Well, so far, I have been using php built in function, mail(), and I have no problems with it, even I sent a blast to 1000+ users. But then, lately I found this phpmailer, which is specially design to send email.

Q1: Should I change to this phpmailer?

Q2: What are the advantages of using phpmailer?

Q3: I found other products on phpmailer website, i.e phpmailer FE, ML etc. What are those? Which one you guys is using?

Q4: Have anyone tried sending blast email to 2000+ users with phpmailer? If yes, does it cause any problems?

Answer 1

Q1: You should definitely switch away from using mail()

Q2: mail() function is really, really for simple stuff. Mail libraries hide a lot of low level stuff from the user, and offer simple ways to make HTML emails, embedded images in mail, etc.

Instead of phpmailer I'd recommend SwiftMailer

• Send emails using SMTP, sendmail, postfix or a custom Transport implementation of your own
• Support servers that require username & password and/or encryption
• Protect from header injection attacks without stripping request data content
• Send MIME compliant HTML/multipart emails
• Use event-driven plugins to customize the library
• Handle large attachments and inline/embedded images with low memory use

I've used SwiftMailer to send 15000+ mails, but as you'll find in SwiftMailer documentation, its recommended to send mails in smaller batches (depends on you server ex. 100, 200, 500 per batch), using cron.