Featured AI Products
Compute
Build, deploy, and scale cloud compute resources
Containers and Images
Safely store and manage containers and backups
Managed Databases
Fully managed resources running popular database engines
Management and Dev Tools
Control infrastructure and gather insights
Networking
Secure and control traffic to apps
Security
Help protect your account and resources with these security features
Storage
Store and access any amount of data reliably in the cloud
Browse all products
AI/ML
CMS
Data and IoT
Developer Tools
Gaming and Media
Hosting
Security and Networking
Startups and SMBs
Web and App Platforms
See all solutions
Community
Documentation
Developer Tools
Get Involved
Utilities and Help
Become a Partner
Marketplace
Pricing

- Community
- DigitalOcean
- Community
- DigitalOcean

Can I Use An External SMTP Service To Send Emails From My PHP Application From My Domain Name?

Posted on November 27, 2020

I setup Postfix on my server which also runs my associated website. After sending a test email I received a message stating the server was associated with spam and blocked from sending to gmail. I cannot afford a dedicated server at this stage of my development but I need a method to send emails for forgotten passwords, 2FA and occasional newsletters and they need to come from my domain name. Can I do this from PHP using Google’s SMTP server and my domain name? I’m not finding good documentation on that process.

Thanks!

This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

KFSys

November 27, 2020

Hi @FringeAvenue,

Yes, you can do that. You can configure your PHP to use SMTP from another server and send e-mails from it, for instance, Google. There are two basic ways of sending emails with PHP: a built-in mail function and external mail packages.

PHP’s built-in mail function () is very simple, but it provides limited functionality for sending emails. You won’t be able to add attachments to your email, and building a beautiful HTML template with embedded images will be a tricky task as well.

The other side of the PHP mail function () is that the email is sent from your web server, which may cause issues with deliverability due to security concerns such as suspicion of spam and blacklisting. The best way to overcome this problem is sending messages via an SMTP server, however, this functionality is limited as well. You can configure SMTP with some external packages, I recommend you to give the following article a read - PHP With SMTP

Regards, KFSys

The developer cloud

Scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

View all products

Start building today

From GPU-powered inference and Kubernetes to managed databases and storage, get everything you need to build, scale, and deploy intelligent applications.