spreed VS PHPMailer

> Tell me another platform that is free, has realtime chat, voice and video, has stable service, allows sharing images and other media, with good ownership management... and is open source.

Mattermost: https://mattermost.com/

Rocket.Chat: https://www.rocket.chat/

Nextcloud Talk: https://nextcloud.com/talk/

Self hosting and some assembly required. I've run all of them on cheap VPSes to explore a Slack/Discord replacement, neither was mindblowing but all of them seemed okay (Nextcloud's offering was rather barebones, though).

Audio and video support varies because getting those right is challenging, at best you'd just integrate with something like Jitsi, that one's actually pretty good for meetings and such: https://jitsi.org/ and has a cloud version too: https://meet.jit.si/ (yet people still go for Zoom and it's odd UI/UX choices)

I actually rather liked forums back in the day, but I guess nobody will be setting up that many phpBB instances in the current year, though projects like Discourse also seem promising: https://www.discourse.org/

I don't think many people at all will be leaving Discord, due to how entrenched the platform is (network effect): if you want people to help you with what you're working on, you go where they are, not vice versa.

To add to this, it's reasonably easy to run, and has many different plugins, from a calendar and contacts list, to an online document editor (like Google Docs, except it can be pretty slow and/or resource intensive: https://nextcloud.com/office/), to a simple clone of Slack (https://nextcloud.com/talk/), a mail client (https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/mail) and other things.

That said, I've had updates (across major versions) break things on multiple occasions, one out of two servers running the exact same version has random crashes and in addition to that the file locking by default (if enabled, but not using Redis: https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/config...) has broken and prevents me from deleting a file that just sits there and takes up a few GB of space. Oh and their Android app fails to upload files if I use the share option, instead of the file picker from within the app.

On the other hand, sure beats storing data on third party clouds and is free, so I'll still keep using it.

> The calendar app is very functional and allows booking of appointments based on availability similar to Calendly. This is one of many apps within its large and expanding suite.

Another noteworthy one is Talk: https://nextcloud.com/talk/

It's not quite as good as something like a self-hosted instance of Mattermost or even Rocket.Chat, but honestly if you already have Nextcloud, then it's pretty cool to be able to get something decent like that up and running quickly.

Ofc that's making Nextcloud a single point of failure in some ways and occasionally things can go sideways with these plugin based platforms (historically applies more to installs of Jenkins, but also have had some performance issues with Nextcloud that had lots of apps, too).

I still rather like Nextcloud because of being able to just run it on my servers and replace a bunch of other third party cloud platforms and still somehow manage to have good enough uptime and security.

Internal chat/communication

Nextcloud Talk (version 15.0.3): Have private video calls and chat using your own server.

Nextcloud Talk

Nextcloud has a chat app https://nextcloud.com/talk/

Nextcloud with the Talk extension can do exactly what you are looking for! https://nextcloud.com/talk/

Then make a form and use PHPMailer.

PHPMailer, as the name suggests, is an email-sending tool for PHP. It offers a straightforward and reliable approach to sending email messages from PHP applications. Security remains a top priority for the PHPMailer creators. It is equipped with built-in support for SSL/TLS encryption, ensuring the protection of email messages against interception and tampering. Moreover, it implements safeguards against common email injection attacks, effectively countering header injection and body injection vulnerabilities.

Have you tried using PHPMailer? mail() really isn't great and ends up being a lot more difficult to use. Phpmailer uses (or can use) SMTP (like Outlook or whichever email app) and is better at HTML and attachments and all that.

I found I have good experiences with a real email address provided by my domain/web host, and then I use the PHPMailer Class to send the message with the appropriate headers and what not.

The easiest way to send e-mails (from a beginner POV) is PHPMailer connected to an existing and configured SMTP server. Does your school has one? If yes, you're all set.

Welcome to this tutorial on how to send emails using PHP! Communication is key, and emails are an essential part of keeping in touch with your users. In this article, we will walk through the process of sending emails using PHP and PHPMailer - a powerful library for sending emails in PHP. We'll also cover how to configure PHPMailer to use SMTP, which is the most common way of sending emails on the web.

Alternatively try using XOAUTH: https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/blob/master/examples/gmail_xoauth.phps

In any case, I don't recommend using mail() anyway. It's a low level function, a PITA to work with and you need to understand some infrastructure stuff to make it reliable. A simple alternative is https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer.

2023-01-23 19:17:31 SERVER -> CLIENT: 334 UGFzc3dvcmQ6 2023-01-23 19:17:31 CLIENT -> SERVER: N1g5dTRfbVV4JEQsKz5BKw== 2023-01-23 19:17:31 SMTP -> get_lines(): $data is "" 2023-01-23 19:17:31 SMTP -> get_lines(): $str is "421 4.7.66 TLS 1.0 and 1.1 are not supported. Please upgrade/update your client to support TLS 1.2. Visit https://aka.ms/smtp_auth_tls. [BL1PR13CA0283.namprd13.prod.outlook.com 2023-01-23T19:17:31.200Z 08DAFCDB1FFF6313] " 2023-01-23 19:17:31 SERVER -> CLIENT: 421 4.7.66 TLS 1.0 and 1.1 are not supported. Please upgrade/update your client to support TLS 1.2. Visit https://aka.ms/smtp_auth_tls. [BL1PR13CA0283.namprd13.prod.outlook.com 2023-01-23T19:17:31.200Z 08DAFCDB1FFF6313] 2023-01-23 19:17:31 SMTP ERROR: Password command failed: 421 4.7.66 TLS 1.0 and 1.1 are not supported. Please upgrade/update your client to support TLS 1.2. Visit https://aka.ms/smtp_auth_tls. [BL1PR13CA0283.namprd13.prod.outlook.com 2023-01-23T19:17:31.200Z 08DAFCDB1FFF6313] 2023-01-23 19:17:31 SMTP Error: Could not authenticate. 2023-01-23 19:17:31 CLIENT -> SERVER: QUIT 2023-01-23 19:17:31 SERVER -> CLIENT: 2023-01-23 19:17:31 SMTP ERROR: QUIT command failed: 2023-01-23 19:17:31 Connection: closed 2023-01-23 19:17:31 SMTP connect() failed. https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/wiki/Troubleshooting