Question

I am trying to send email through gmail using PHPMailer_V5.1.

Getting the following error,

SMTP -> ERROR: Failed to connect to server: Unable to find the socket transport “ssl” – did you forget to enable it when you configured PHP? (41961176)
SMTP Error: Could not connect to SMTP host.

The following is the code which came with the PHPMailer download, I just modified the
required fields,

<?php
    require_once('../class.phpmailer.php');
    //include("class.smtp.php"); // optional, gets called from within class.phpmailer.php if not already loaded

    $mail = new PHPMailer(true); // the true param means it will throw exceptions on errors, which we need to catch

    $mail->IsSMTP(); // telling the class to use SMTP

    try {
      $mail->Host       = "mail.yourdomain.com"; // SMTP server
      $mail->SMTPDebug  = 2;                     // enables SMTP debug information (for testing)
      $mail->SMTPAuth   = true;                  // enable SMTP authentication
      $mail->SMTPSecure = "ssl";                 // sets the prefix to the servier
      $mail->Host       = "smtp.gmail.com";      // sets GMAIL as the SMTP server
      $mail->Port       = 465;                   // set the SMTP port for the GMAIL server
      $mail->Username   = "[e-mail]";  // GMAIL username
      $mail->Password   = "********";            // GMAIL password
      $mail->AddReplyTo('[e-mail]', 'First Last');
      $mail->AddAddress('[e-mail]', 'John Doe');
      $mail->SetFrom('[e-mail]', 'First Last');
      $mail->AddReplyTo('[e-mail]', 'First Last');
      $mail->Subject = 'PHPMailer Test Subject via mail(), advanced';
      $mail->AltBody = 'To view the message, please use an HTML compatible email viewer!'; // optional - MsgHTML will create an alternate automatically
      $mail->MsgHTML(file_get_contents('contents.html'));
      $mail->AddAttachment('images/phpmailer.gif');      // attachment
      $mail->AddAttachment('images/phpmailer_mini.gif'); // attachment
      $mail->Send();
      echo "Message Sent OK</p>\n";
    } catch (phpmailerException $e) {
      echo $e->errorMessage(); //Pretty error messages from PHPMailer
    } catch (Exception $e) {
      echo $e->getMessage(); //Boring error messages from anything else!
    }
    ?>

Answer 1

Based on the error it seems that SSL is not enabled in PHP. Off the top of my head I believe that you need to uncomment

extension = PHP_openssl.dll

in your php.ini file

Following should help you install SSL if it is already setup on your system:

https://www.php.net/manual/en/openssl.installation.php