Question

I want to implement an alternative method for logging in (for @mother_company.xyz type e-mails) and impose it.

The reason is leaving the e-mail provider (in this case Exchange) handle password recovery, password storage to prevent password theft and leave the mail server administrator the job of passing accounts arround (also, mail address owner verification is eliminated and the account can be auto-created on first login).

I have looked at Zend_Mail and Pear Net::SMTP they don’t seem to allow just SMTP auth, they require sending an e-mail.

Does (preferably standalone, preferably maintained) a PHP SMTP class exist, which can do all SMTP auth types + all encryption methods (SSL, TLS, StartTLS, etc.) and does not require modification for the presented purpose (it also must return usefull codes to determine if login succeeded or failed)?

It would be nice if such a class could autoconfigure the SMTP connection data trough trials (based solely on the domain name), and then return the config for caching/storage.

Answer 1

There is Swiftmailer mailing tool for php5. It consists of several components. One of this components is Swift_SmtpTransport. It extends Swift_Transport_EsmtpTransport that is highly configurable class. U can use start() method of this class just to check if AUTH request was successful

require_once("lib/swift_required.php");

$swiftMailerSMTP=Swift_SmtpTransport::newInstance("smtp.gmail.com", 587, "tls")
    ->setUsername("[e-mail]")
    ->setPassword("iforgotmypassword")
;

//throws Swift_TransportException on auth failure
$swiftMailerSMTP->start();

//end the connection, just in case the current script is going to run for a long while
$swiftMailerSMTP->stop();
$swiftMailerSMTP=null;