Description: ------------ The following code will open up an SSL connection to a mail server (assuming, of course, PHP has SSL support compiled in). $host = "mail.host.com"; $host = "ssl://$host"; $port = 465; // 465 is a common smtps port $smtp = new Net_SMTP ("$host", $port); $smtp->connect (); Some SMTP authentication methods send the password as cleartext. It is therefore a good idea to encrypt the connection to prevent password sniffing. However, the Pear documentation for Net_SMTP (link below) makes no mention of this non-obvious method of encrypting SMTP connections. http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.networking.net-smtp.net-smtp.net-smtp.php Additionally, adding a link to the below page would be useful, as it contains further information about fsockopen and possible formats of the $host string in various version of PHP. http://www.php.net/manual/en/transports.php Thanks for supporting PHP!