Cakephp email sent but not received

Question

I am running Cakephp 2.4.3 and am trying to send an email with CakeEmail.

I have this code at the top of my UsersController:

App::uses('AppController','Controller','CakeEmail','Network/Email');

this function in the Controller:

function send_email(){
    try{
        $email = new CakeEmail('test');
        $email->from('sender@example.com');
        $email->to('me@gmail.com');
        $email->subject('Test');
        if($email->send('Test Message'))
            echo 'Success';
        else echo 'Failure without Exception';
    } catch (Exception $e){
        echo 'Failure with Exception';
    }
}

and this in Config/email.php

public $test = array(
  'log' => true
);

When I go to the url: mysite.com/users/send_email

it says "Success" and the debug log says:

2014-05-30 22:49:43 Debug: 
From: sender@example.com
X-Mailer: CakePHP Email
Date: Fri, 30 May 2014 22:49:43 +0000
Message-ID: <53890b07e3b44b2b88132a62ad2deb05@mysite.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Test Message

but I never get an email coming into my Gmail account. I have checked my spam folder as well. What could be the issue and how else can I debug this?

UPDATE:

My cake app is being hosted on the web. I tried using a different email address at a different domain and changing the email code to this:

try{
    if(mail('xxx@iioengine.com','Test Subject','Test Message'))
        echo 'Success';
    else echo 'Failure without Exception';
} catch (Exception $e){
    echo 'Failure with Exception';
}

but the result did not change.

Answer 1

Sending mail generally doesn't work from localhost. You can try and set the port in the settings, but your isp will probably have the port blocked.

Just checking the specs: http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/core-utility-libraries/email.html

It looks like maybe your new declaration shouldn't have test inside:

$Email = new CakeEmail();

To debug, you could try sending an email to a different host (not gmail). You could also try using the default php mail() function, which is actually quite simple to use and very similar to cake's layout, not surprisingly.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php