CodeIgniter send SMTP Gmail

Question

Hey guys I'm trying to create a reset password for this forum I'm developing.... Anyway I followed a bunch of guides and tried many versions of what you will see and this is the one with the least errors.... Still I can't figure out what's wrong, I could use your help please.

class CI_Email {  //in library email.php

var $useragent      = "CodeIgniter";
var $mailpath       = "/usr/sbin/msmtp";    // Sendmail path
var $protocol       = "smtp";   // mail/sendmail/smtp
var $smtp_host      = "smtp.googlemail.com";        // SMTP Server.
var $smtp_user      = "[email protected]";       // SMTP Username
var $smtp_pass      = "mypass";     // SMTP Password
var $smtp_port      = "465";        // SMTP Port
var $smtp_timeout   = 5;        // SMTP Timeout in seconds
var $smtp_crypto    = "";       // SMTP Encryption. Can be null, tls or ssl.
var $mailtype       = "html";   // text/html  Defines email formatting
var $charset        = "utf-8";  // Default char set: iso-8859-1 or us-ascii

And this is the result:

hello: 
The following SMTP error was encountered: 
Failed to send AUTH LOGIN command. Error: 
from: 
The following SMTP error was encountered: 
to: 
The following SMTP error was encountered: 
data: 
The following SMTP error was encountered: 

The following SMTP error was encountered: 
Unable to send email using PHP SMTP. Your server might not be configured to send mail using this method.
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="B_ALT_51cd96f2daf24"

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
Your email application may not support this format.

--B_ALT_51cd96f2daf24
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

My text here...

--B_ALT_51cd96f2daf24
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

I also tried a lot of other config i found online such as:

    var $mailpath      = "/usr/sbin/sendmail";    // Sendmail path 
    var $smtp_host     = "ssl://smtp.googlemail.com";        // SMTP Server.

or:

    var $mailpath      = "/usr/sbin/sendmail";    // Sendmail path
    var $smtp_host     = "ssl://smtp.gmail.com";        // SMTP Server.

With SSL protocol in smtp_host I was getting an endless screen of countless errors.

Answer 1

I have used a test Gmail account for non-production CodeIgniter email testing, but when I deploy to the production server I use the ENVIRONMENT constant to detect the correct mail connection settings.

For Gmail, I found these configuration settings (which I have put in /application/config/email.php) work fine:

    $config = Array(
      'protocol' => 'smtp',
      'smtp_host' => 'ssl://smtp.googlemail.com',
      'smtp_port' => 465,
      'smtp_user' => '<test-account-name>@gmail.com',
      'smtp_pass' => '<test-account-password>',
    );

Your emails will most likely be marked as spam by the recipients email, until they white list your sender.

And FWIW, don't edit core CodeIgniter files, you can supply your connection details a number of different ways.