In this article we will look at the protocol that is involved in sending email messages. We will also examine the thorny issue of how to send an attachment with an email message. This article is the second of two parts.

They include examples of sending simple messages and more complex ones with things like attachments and custom headers. They also tack on a look at the PEAR::Mail package to the end showing how it can make sending some things a little less painful.

Using PHP's built in function (aptly named mail() ) is relatively straightforward - until you need slightly more advanced features, such as adding and encoding email headers or sending multiple mails efficiently. Fortunately, the Zend Framework comes with a very capable mail component called Zend_Mail.

He shows how to send a simple email, do something a bit more complex with a custom SMTP server, read messages from a remote POP3 email box and how to attach a binary file/message.

While each of these [PEAR Mail, PhpMailer, SwiftMailer, Zend_Mail] will work with Solar, the new Solar_Mail and Solar_Smtp packages work "natively", in that they support automatic configuration, locale and exception inheritance, and so on. Read on for some examples on how to use them.

In his example he sets up and sends a simple message, setting the contents of the email (sent as an HTML message). Since there's been much talk about the safety of a lot of the mailing systems in frameworks, Paul talks about how it's been secured from header injections, through safe attachments, and from a transport dependency-injection for SMTP.

There's even a method included that lets you take the SMTP information out of the script and put it into the Solar configuration file to use in the entire application.

Here's a link to the first article.

Sometimes it can be useful to have a dump of the current database schema. This script reads the schema from a MySQL database and outputs XML that describes the schema.

And a link to article number two.

So, you want to send automated email messages from your PHP application. This can be in direct response to a user's action, such as signing up for your site, or a recurring event at a set time, such as a monthly newsletter. Sometimes email contains file attachments, both plain text and HTML portions, and so on. To understand how to send each variation that may exist on an email, we will start with the simple example and move to the more complicated.

In this second part of a two-part article, you'll learn how to manage email headers when creating a PHP email program, attach a file to a message, and more.

In this part they cover some of the details about the structure of emails, how to add an attachment to an email (for both a normal file and images for an HTML email), as well as a mention of how email is delivered.

This article outlines the design of a PHP class for sending email with attachments. Everything you need to do this is supplied by the core PHP system, so nothing additional (such as non-bundled extensions) should be needed save for the required set up and connection between PHP and a SMTP mail package such as Sendmail or Postfix.

For details on setting up Sendmail and PHP, read through the appropriate section of the PHP manual. If you are already using the mail() function in PHP, you are ready to go right now.

They start off simple, creating the basic framework of the mailer class - to, from, subject, etc. From there, they build the header creation function to input the right information. Then, it's on to the heart of the matter - the "add attachment" function, and the "determine mime type" function". From there, the rest is simple...]]> Wed, 04 Jan 2006 09:01:09 -0600