Sending email through PhpMailer doesn't return response to Javascript

Question

I'm using PhpMailer to send emails from a php/Javascript and it's working BUT is not returning the success: function(response).

My javascript:

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
$(document).ready(function() {

     $('.pendente').click(function() {
            $.ajax({
                type: 'POST',
                dataType: 'json',
                url: 'send_email.php',
                async: true,
                data: dados,
                context: this,
                success: function(response) {
                    alert("Ok!");
                    $(this).removeClass('btn-default').addClass('btn-warning');

                }
            });

});

My send_email.php:

<?php 
include "ligacao.php"; //connection string to BD

$encweb = $_POST['enc'];
$datapendente = date("Y-m-d H:i:s");

$texto = "'Pendente em ".$datapendente;
$texto = $texto."'";

$sql="UPDATE Texoleo.dbo.bo set bo.logi2=0, bo.logi4=1 ";
$sql=$sql.", bo.dataopen='".$datapendente."', bo.u_msgshist=";
$sql=$sql." concat(".$texto.", char(13)+char(10))+(cast(bo.u_msgshist as nvarchar(600))) ";
$sql=$sql." where bo.fref='".$encweb."'";

$result = odbc_exec($connect, $sql);
/**** Fim sql ****/


/**** Enviar email ****/

$clientenome = $_POST['nome'];
$clienteemail = $_POST['email'];

include('lib/class.phpmailer.php');
include('lib/class.smtp.php');

$mail = new PHPMailer;

$mail->SMTPDebug = 2;                              

$mail->isSMTP();                                      
$mail->Host = 'myhost.com';  
$mail->SMTPAuth = true;                              

$mail->Username ='user@user.com';
$mail->Password = 'mypassword'; 
$mail->SMTPSecure = 'tls';                           
$mail->Port = 587;                                  

$mail->setFrom('my@email.com', 'Me');
$mail->addAddress('customer email', 'Customer name');

$mail->isHTML(true);                                  
$texto = 'bla, bla, bla ';
$mail->Subject = 'My subject';
$mail->Body    =  $texto;
$mail->AltBody = 'This is the body in plain text for non-HTML mail clients';

if(!$mail->send()) {
    echo 'Message could not be sent.';
    echo 'Mailer Error: ' . $mail->ErrorInfo;
} else {
    echo 'Message has been sent';
};

$response = array("success" => true);
echo json_encode($response);

?>

Testing the same Javascript without the $mail->send() it returns success true, but with $mail->send() it does what it has to do (some SQL updates and email sent) but it doesn't return the success true to continue doing the Javascript code.

Answer 1

As in my comment:

The debug output is messing with the JSON format. Disable it by setting SMTPDebug = 0, and remove any other non-JSON output too.

You can usually see this kind of thing happening if you inspect the responses to your XHR requests in your browser’s dev tools.