Is there an email service that will link to my web site?

I want to send email to my contacts froom my web site, but my hosting service say they will only enable email for customers who buy their full shopping mall software.

I looked for mailing services on the internet, but they all seem to be standalone services - they keep your mailing lists, templates, etc - rather than allowing you to link to them to send individual emails. I’ve also seen some that will mail forms created on your web site, but I don’t want forms either. I just want to use php to create an email and mail it off to my contact, for example, confirmation of registration on my site.

Does anyone know of a service provider that can help me?

To be honest, get a better web host. If they’re not providing that simple and basic functionality then I would wonder what other services they’re not willing to provide.

I’ve never had a host that hasn’t had mail enabled.

That was my first reaction too, but unfortunately it’s not my decision and my business partner wants to stay with that host because it’s supposed to be the best in Korea. (I’m not Korean and don’t live there, so I can’t tell.)

So it seems I am stuck with trying to find a workaround.

By the way, I see you are in melbourne, and so am I - a service provider in Australia would be good.

If you can find any provider who offers SMTP (possibly even your personal ISP) then you could use SMTP to send the email.

PHPMailer is a good set of Mail classes for PHP which includes a smtp connector, and authentication if your provider requires it.

Failing that, if you have access to alternative hosting you could set up a script on that hosting that takes a call from the Korea hosting and sends the email.

To be honest, if it’s the best in Korea then it HAS mail services - it’s one of the core staple requirements for a host.

Sounds like a plumber who will only fix your sink if you buy some lingerie from him :S I’ve never seen a host that didn’t offer at least one free email account. Is it actually a hosting company? or a hosted shopping application company?

I don’t think he wants an email account per se, what he wants is the ability to send emails from his scripts.

Ah, well then as you said: you can just use SMTP. Personally I prefer swift to phpmailer, and you can use a free gmail account to do this.

My point was that this doesn’t really sound like a web host, but perhaps an hosted app. Or if it is a web host, yes, it is certainly not the best.

I am trying to use swift mailer, but I keep getting a timeout when trying to send thru gmail. I think it’s because I don’t have SSL and am using port 465.

Is there a way of sending unencrypted emails without SSL using gmail? Or do they insist on SSL?

The message is:

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\htdocs\swiftmailer\lib\classes\Swift\Transport\StreamBuffer.php on line 167