BH0's Personal Blog

Send HTML Email With PHP

2018-01-21

Hello, in this blog we will learn how to send an email which is a HTML file using PHP and the emails we will get from a JSON file - because I really like JSON. Please note that this may only work with a Gmail account.

What will we use?

PHP - duh
Laragon - a local Apache server
JSON - a method of storing data
HTML - and CSS to produce the email’s appearance

Set up

Firstly, we will need to install and configure Laragon, Laragon will give us access to PHP, Apache web-server, and a “mail sender”.

We will also need three files: “index.php” - the file which will contain our code, “email.html” - the email we wish to send and “mailinglist.json” - the file which our emails come from (yes you can use another source such as a simple array or a database).

Laragon Set up

Navigate to Laragon’s website’s download section: https://laragon.org/download/ and select one of the downloads, I use “Laragon Wamp” but theoretically anything including PHP and Apache should work.

Follow the installation wizard and things should be fairly straight forward.

When the download is complete open the Laragon Window and click the “gear icon” - “preferences”.
Navigate to the “Mail Sender” configuration area by clicking on the “Mail Sender” tab
Enter your Gmail account username + password
Feel free to press “Test Sending Mail…” to ensure everything is set up correctly
Exit this Window and click “Start All” to run the server
Click “Menu” then navigate to “Quick Create” and select “blank”
Name the project appropriately - this is the root folder’s name for all your files
And everything should be good to go (you may have to give Laragon permission)
Now ensure you create 3 (or at least 2) files within your project folder: “index.php”, “email.html” and optionally “mailinglist.json”

The Code

Email

 
<h2> Email to YOU </h2>
<p> This is an email sent using PHP </p>
<p> Why isn't this responsive? </p>
<div><b> Because the writer was too lazy to produce / obtain a responsive HTML email</b>
<br>
<ul> Email sent using
    <li> Laragon </li>
    <li> PHP </li>
    <li> Apache </li>
    <li> JSON </li>
    <li> HTML </li>
</ul>

Feel free to use a responsive HTML email here, to learn how to do so I recommend Devtip’s “How to Code a Responsive HTML Email” - https://youtu.be/XnWIperMy08 , I may make my own tutorial on this - just note that you must use inline styling. I assume you can read HTML.

mailinglist.json

 
{
    "emails": [ "example@example.ex", "example@example.ex"]
}

Don’t forget to swap out this file with your desired email addresses. Or you can use your own email-source. I like work with tools which return J/BSON so I used JSON.

index.php

 
<?php
/// Obtain Email Content
$email = file_get_contents("email.html");
/// Will help let the server/s know this is an HTML file
$headers = 'Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8' . "\r\n";
//$recipients = array("example@example.ex", "example@example.ex");
// Obtain Emails From JSON file
$mailinglist = json_decode(file_get_contents('mailinglist.json'), true);
$recipients = $mailinglist['emails'];
/// Send Email
foreach ($recipients as $recipient) {
    if (mail($recipient, "the subject", $email, $headers)) {
        echo ' Your email has been sent successfully.';
    } else {
        echo 'Failed to send email. ';
    }
}
?>
<h2>Attempted to send email sent to <?php for ($i = 0; $i < sizeof($recipients); $i += 1) {
    echo ' Email: ' . $recipients[$i];
} ?> </h2>

What this code does:

get the email content by reading the file contents
The header variable is then used to make it clear to our tools that we the file contents should be HTML thus it will not output the HTML as a text file
We then get the emails from the mailinglist file - if you’re unfamilliar with JSON I suggest reading up on it
As our emails are stored in an array - we then loop through this array to send an individually email to each email address
We then output some sort of message to inform the person sending the emails that everything was a success

Notice the “the subject” parameter - as an extra curriculum task you’re welcome to figure out how to get the header element’s contents of your email and use this as the subject but I didn’t feel that was in the scope of this tutorial.

To run this code open up the Laragon menu:

Ensure your server is running
Click menu > “www” > select [your project name]
And it will open in a web browser and display the HTML output and run the PHP code - if you have no errors your email should be sitting within the appropriate inboxes.

And yes, you can continue to automate this much more, for example, making the code run at a specific time and perhaps adjusting it to work with multiple emails.

The possibillities are theoretically endless.

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