In a recent post to the Web Development Blog they talks a look at some methods you can use on your site to help reduce the amount of spam sent to email addresses by protecting them from scripts that might harvest them right from the page.

There are lots of spam bots checking the Internet for email addresses on regular websites, forums, blog and mailing lists. Once caught by some spam bot your mailbox is in need of a strong spam filter or sometimes it might be better to use a new e-mail address. In this article we show you different ways, how you're able to show your e-mail address to human visitors and hide it for spam bots.

They give four solutions, some a bit more practical than others - using an image instead of the text-only version of the address, hiding the @ symbol, hiding it with PHP (converting it to ASCII) and using Javascript to handle it similarly.

In a recent post to his blog Idrish Laxmidhar walks you through the process of getting Mercury set up for local mailing and used by an XAMPP installation for debugging.

Had tried to make php mail() work on localhost. But had failed. So gave up. This was around 8 months back. Now again some days back had to use the Php mail function on one project. [...] A lot of google searching and some simple steps, I could make it work. So here sharing my experience with you.

He starts with a list of requirements to follow along with his process - a web server, a mail server (in this case Mercury) and a mail client - and then starts into the steps. Each one is accompanied by screenshots showing you exactly what each of the screens should look like as you follow along. In the end you'll have a local mail server you can connect to and test with without ever having to send out a public email.

In this new post to his PHPJack blog today Richard Thomas has another "Solar Short" showing you a handy feature of the Solar framework. This post looks at how to send emails.

Sending email using the Solar Framework is not only extremely simple but very flexible as well. Solar splits the process of sending email into 2 logical parts, creating the message "package" and sending the "package"

He includes a code example of using the Solar_Mail package to create and send an email with a text section, a HTML component and an image attachment. There's also a few lines dedicated to the Solar_Mail_Transport component and how you can use it directly with PHP's mail function.

In a recent post to his blog Ian Christian has written up an example of how to send a multipart email from a Task inside your Symfony application.

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.

On the NETTUTS.com website today there's a new tutorial showing how to create a simple signup form (username, password, email address) for your site with a MySQL backend database.

In this tutorial, we are going to be creating a user signup form that adds a user to a database, and then sends out a confirmation email that the user must click on before their account will be activated.

Everything's provided - the database structure, the code to make the submit process work, how to confirm the user once they come back in and creating a simple templating system for the emails it sends. You can download the full source to get it all in one bundle.

On the Web Development Blog there's a recent post about using the PHPMailer package to send email out via the Google Mail servers.

These days I tried some plugin to send mail message within bbpress via SMTP. Since my domains email is hosted with Google applications I decided to send my messages via the SMTP server from Gmail. I found several articles and tutorials, but a lot of them didn't work for me. [...] You need for this code example a PHP5 enabled web host (I tested only on Linux), the port 465 need to be open and of course you need a Gmail or Google applications account.

Complete code is provided - a smtpmailer function that takes in the standard mail parameters (to, from, subject, msg) and ships the message off to the Gmail STMP servers (on their custom port 465).

The NETTUTS.com site has posted the vidcast for the third day of their look at the CodeIgniter framework (and creating a full simple application with it).

At the request of some of our readers, this week, we'll examine just how easy it is to send emails with attachments using Gmail. With raw PHP, this would be a long and tedious task. However, with CodeIgniter, it's a cinch! I'll show you how in this eighteen minute video tutorial.

You can watch the video via their in-page player and grab the source code if you'd like to follow along.

On the NETTUTS.com site, a new tutorial has been posted about implementing a system to validate new members/signups for your site via their email.

Have you ever created an account with a website, and were required to check your email and click through a verification link sent by the company in order to activate it? Doing so highly reduces the number of spam accounts. In this lesson, we'll learn how to do this very thing!

The system takes a user's information via the signup page (username and email address), does some checking on the input, inserts the information into a backend MySQL database and sends a validation email to the user's address. The email contains a custom link the user then clicks on that confirms them as a validated account.

On the NETTUTS site today there's a new article (continuing on from this tutorial) looking at how to make a "forgot your password" system to add on to their current login technique.

In my last tutorial, 'A Better Login System', a few people commented on how they would like to see a tutorial on password recovery, which is something you don't always see in user access tutorials. The tutorial I am bringing you today will deal with just that. Using mySQLi, we will learn to recover unencrypted and (one-way) encrypted passwords.

They give you what you'll need to set up the database for the user information and the PHP code you'll need to connect to it and fetch the user's information. The script then generates an email with a custom link that will take the user to a page asking them to answer a security question before they can continue.

If you're going to be attending this year's php|tek (in Chicago) Keith Casey has a suggestion for something else you don't want to miss while you're there - the Unconference happening "after hours" every day of the main conference (save the tutorial day).

Well, we're just about two weeks from php|tek 2009. While many of the presenters are touching up their slides, brushing up their talks, and thinking of the pizza that's yet to come... I have a different question for you: What are you doing? As of today, I'm officially collecting ideas for the php|tek unconference. As I get ideas (I already have quite a few), I'll post them on [...] Joind.in under the php|tek Unconference event. Then all you have to do is register on the site, vote for the session, and feel free to leave feedback.

He's looking for a few good talks or even suggestions for talks you might like to hear about. If you have an idea, let Keith know either via email (at keith [at] blueparabola.com) or on Twitter. He'll add them to the Joind.in page for the event for comment, suggestions and votes on which you, the adoring public, might want to hear.