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
What you're describing is really relaying, which is usually configured in the mail server config (not the messages), but you don't have access to anything like that in gmail.
You can set allowed aliases in gmail, but I would guess that these are not allowed to overlap with existing gmail account names as that would be a major security hole. Why not enable "less secure apps" on the main account? It's not as if it is actually any less secure - if anything it's better, because the setup to use OAuth2 is so deeply complex and unpleasant...
That said, rather than trying to do all this forgery, you may be interested in this PR and associated docs. It's fairly likely the xoauth branch will get merged into master and released without any further changes as PHPMailer 5.2.11, and it would very helpful if you could give it a try.