In most cases your installation of PHP will be capable of sending emails. If you are using a shared host, or if you installed PHP using a package management system like apt-get, more than likely you're all set. You'll really only need to worry about extra configuration if you're compiling PHP from source or if you're running it on Windows. In either case, there are plenty of resources available online to help you out. Because that's all beyond the scope of this article, I'll assume you're set. If not, Google will be your friend.

He starts with a simple example using the mail function but quickly moves on to sending a multi-part email with an attached zip file and HTML content. He includes the all code you'll need and explains each part in detail so you'll know exactly what's going on.

I recently needed to send the result of an action in symfony via email daily. E-mail has changed slightly in symfony 1.3/1.4 - here's how I did it. I really don't like my solution at all, the use of get_partial() from within a Task seems very wrong to me - but I'm in a rush so it will do for now, I'd love to hear feedback.

His class extends the sfBaseTask and sets up an execute method that builds a database connection, fetches a few rows and, with a newly created mailer instance, sends the information using the get_partial method to define both HTML and text content parts of the email.

The standard way of debugging in PHP involves just echoing shit to the screen. The fact that PHP is a scripting language makes this an excellent way of debugging on the web. But what happens when doing this breaks your site?

That's where FirePHP comes in - it sends along a special request from your PHP script (as fired off by special code you insert) to include debugging information inside a different part of a "multipart/mixed" message. Terry also includes some of his sample code (including a custom version of the software) that he used to get things working. Check out the screenshot for the results.