如何从phpmailer获取错误列表？

Question

I'm sending emails through PHPMailer and I found a specific case when the email address is a non-existing email address that belongs to the sending gateway [ e.g - gateway email: [e-mail] and the email address [e-mail]], phpmailer returns the following error: "Recipient address rejected user unknown in virtual mailbox table".

It would be great if a status code might be present there (I want to know if is a hard bounce or a soft bounce) and also, I want to know what kind of other specific cases might occur.

Answer 1

SMTP errors are covered by RFC5321 and related RFCs, and you can see most significant errors codes there. When you get an SMTP error in PHPMailer, the SMTP error code is put in the $error property of the SMTP instance, which is protected, but you can fetch it using getError(). From normal PHP code this would be done with:

$error = $mail->getSMTPInstance()->getError();

The result is an array like this:

[
    'error' => $message,
    'detail' => $detail,
    'smtp_code' => $smtp_code,
    'smtp_code_ex' => $smtp_code_ex,
]

The thing that will be of most interest to you is the smtp_code element.

Note that this only applies when you're sending via SMTP; if you're sending via mail(), this won't be populated.