In a new tutorial posted to the NetTuts.com site they show you an alternative method for sending emails from your PHP application: using the Mailgun API. This API provides an interface into the Mailgun service, specifically made for sending emails without the hassles of hosting your own email server.

Over the past couple years I've run into various frustrations with both open source email list applications and paid cloud-based providers. In this tutorial, I'll guide you through my adoption of Mailgun.com, an economical solution I've been using successfully now for two years. [...] Mailgun is a cloud-based SaaS email cannon, like SendGrid. It's actually free for up to 10,000 emails per month. Mailgun is incredibly powerful and offers a well-documented API in a variety of popular languages. It provides for both send and receive capabilities, the latter of which can be quite difficult to develop from scratch. While Mailgun doesn't provide templates for rich HTML newsletters, it provides a platform upon which you can build anything.

He shows you how to use the service using a simple "ListApp" application (found on GitHub here) that provides some of the most common email list management functionality. He shows you how to set up a free Mailgun account and where to find their PHP SDK for the PHP integration. He then gets into the code examples, showing how to connect to the API via the SDK and doing tasks such as:

• Creating and update a mailing list
• Importing members to a list
• Showing a list of current list subscribers
• Send a new message
• Synchronizing lists and members

He ends the post with a quick section about extending the ListApp application (or the PHP SDK) with a suggestion to add better error reporting or a queue system to manage the remote API requests more efficiently.