PHPMailer: Dynamic gmail forwarding

Question

I do not know if what I want to do is possible (but finding out that it isn't would be useful in itself).

I cannot use my company's gmail account "[email protected]" directly with PHPMailer. I can, however, use an intermediary gmail account "[email protected]" which can have "less secure apps" enabled, which permits SMTP verification.

However I do not want to have the emails be sent from this [email protected] account (wouldn't look particularly professional) - but rather the company's gmail account.

I can send the emails from the intermediary account to [email protected]; either through the editing of the PHPMailer parameters, or by automatically forwarding emails from [email protected] to the company account.

The problem lies in how [email protected] can then successfully email the email (or at least appear to be the sender), as originally intended.

The code so far

$Mail = new PHPMailer();
$Mail->IsSMTP(); // Use SMTP
$Mail->Host        = "smtp.gmail.com"; // Sets SMTP server for gmail
$Mail->SMTPDebug   = 0; // 2 to enable SMTP debug information
$Mail->SMTPAuth    = TRUE; // enable SMTP authentication
$Mail->SMTPSecure  = "tls"; //Secure conection
$Mail->Port        = 587; // set the SMTP port to gmail's port
$Mail->Username    = '[email protected]'; // gmail account username
$Mail->Password    = 'a_password'; // gmail account password
$Mail->Priority    = 1; // Highest priority - Email priority (1 = High, 3 = Normal, 5 =   low)
$Mail->CharSet     = 'UTF-8';
$Mail->Encoding    = '8bit';
$Mail->Subject     = 'Mail test';
$Mail->ContentType = 'text/html; charset=utf-8\r\n';
$Mail->From        = '[email protected]'; //Your email adress (Gmail overwrites it anyway)
$Mail->FromName    = 'Testing Again';
$Mail->WordWrap    = 900; // RFC 2822 Compliant for Max 998 characters per line

$Mail->addAddress($personEmail); // To: the PERSON WE WANT TO EMAIL
$Mail->isHTML( TRUE );
$Mail->Body    = ' Good news '.$personName.'! The email sent correctly!';
$Mail->AltBody = 'This is a test mail';
$Mail->Send();
$Mail->SmtpClose();

if(!$Mail->send()) {
echo 'Message could not be sent.';
echo 'Mailer Error: ' . $Mail->ErrorInfo;
exit;
}

So the issue is: not having the email sent to $personEmail from [email protected] (that's trivial) but rather how to send the email from [email protected] to [email protected] such that [email protected] forwards the message to $personEmail

I'm not following. You're saying it's trivial to send emails TO: $personEmail, FROM:[email protected] via [email protected]? But this is not possible either (The comments in your code agree! (Gmail overwrites it anyway)) — HPierce
@HPierce oh no: it's trivial to send emails TO: $personEmail, FROM:[email protected]. It's the via bit that's the problem! — Stumbler
Regardless of the problem itself (which I don't think you can fix in gmail), you've based your code on an old example and are thus probably using an old version of PHPMailer, which never helps. — Synchro

Oh boy do I try Oh boy do I try · Accepted Answer · 2015-08-05T14:48:17

PHPMailer is made for sending.

What you want to do is forward an email. This implies receiving the email and then sending it through.

What you need is some kind of IMAP client in php, that will allow you to read the emails on [email protected] (and maybe [email protected]). Then save their body and title and pass it to PHPMailer. You can then use PHPMailer to send the emails with [email protected].

PHPMailer: Dynamic gmail forwarding

2 Answers