On the Techfounder blog (from Eran Galperin) there's a quick tutorial about using the Zend_Mail component of the Zend Framework to send both normal, plain-text emails and ones with MIME attachments.

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.

On the Developer Tutorials blog, there's a recent example of how to validate a common task of many signup forms - if the email sent is actually received.

For any web developer that's ever had to build a signup routine, email is the necessary evil that takes pride of place among hated activities. Sure, a simple call to the language's mail library will send a message through, but the moment the boss wants a HTML email, or users need attachments, everything starts to get tricky.

They try to solve the mail return issue (it tells if the message has gone to the queue, not been delivered) with a little testing and Fakemail. The software looks for emails based on the configuration given and pulls them out to a local directory. Your script can then look here and check the validity of the message before its sent.

This even allows for integration with things like Phing, SimpleTest and Selenium.

DevShed has posted the second part of their series looking at handling MIME attachments in PHP generated emails today. This time they focus on the modification of their PHP4 class to make sending the emails easy.

In this second tutorial of the series, I'm going to teach you how to improve the initial structure of the MIME mailer class developed in the first article by giving it the ability to work directly with attachments. Sounds fairly interesting, right? Then don't waste any more time in preliminaries and begin reading this article now!

They refresh you on the code from the former tutorial and show you how to modify it to work with more than just the simple plain-text attachment like before (with binary information, things like JPEGs, PDFs and other text formats like XML and HTML).

In this new tutorial on DevShed Alejandro Gervasio explains how to send emails from PHP with MIME payloads attached.

One of the most common tasks that a PHP programmer has to tackle is the development of applications that send MIME email in one form or another. In simple terms, MIME email consists of an extension of traditional email technology and comes in handy for sending email messages in fancy HTML and handling file attachments in a wide variety of formats.

In this first part of the series he just lays the groundwork - creating the mailer class they'll use for the series and using it to send a sample email (a basic message with a plain text MIME block).

On the Symfony blog, there's a new post showing the answer to a common question framework users have - what's the best way to send emails from inside our framework applications.

Sending mails is a web developer's everyday task, and symfony 1.1 let you do this easier than ever using Swift Mailer. Swift Mailer is a well thought, fully featured PHP5 object library that will cover 120% of your mailing needs.

They show how to create a partial or a component in your application that generates the content for the emails and pushes that result out to the Swift Mailer application. They show the (simple) installation from a svn checkout and two examples of sending emails, one simple and another with a multipart message.

Tim Koschutzki has five quick tips for the CakePHP users out there to help make your lives just a bit easier:

• The prd() convenience function
• How to debug your CakePHP emails?
• Use elements where possible and make them belong to the controller
• Combine your h1 titles with Cake's page title
• Avoid long parameter lists

Each tip comes complete with code and a brief explanation of its use.

Ken Guest, in a response to another post from a different blogger, has posted some of his own validation replacements for the regular expression method the other blogger chose.

I've noticed that Richard Heyes, who professes himself to be a php guru, deleted my comment on his "Some common regular expressions" posting which simply pointed out his expressions didn't quite do the job and suggested a few PEAR packages that should be used instead of the expressions that he proffered

His examples have the benefit of what he calls "defense in depth" - the functionality to catch a bit more than just a regular expression can alone. His examples include PEAR_Validate for email addresses, Net_CheckIP2 for IP addresses and the Validate_UK package for the sort code and telephone numbers.

Time has come back around for the 2008-2009 PEAR group elections and David Coallier has posted some details about this year's elections.

It is now this time of the year again where the PEAR Group throws in the PEAR Group Nominations. The nominated people will then be called for votes by the community and 7 lucky (even though luck has nothing to do with it) will be elected as the new PEAR Group member for the year 2008-2009.

The entire PHP community is requested to nominate who they think would make the best addition to the group, regardless of how they're related to the PEAR project. Nominations should be sent to Martin Jansen by midnight (UTC) May 31st.

On the PhPL33t blog, there's a guide for automating the creation of email addresses with the Plesk administration application:

In 2003 I wrote "Plesk Auto Email", the first fully funtional Plesk email automation suite. Now, I am going to show you how to do it. You will need a dedicated server with Linux, Plesk 7.5 and higher, php5, mysql5, and root access. This will show you how to code the auto creation, I am not going into deletions and edits at this time because I don't have all night to blog.

Included are the database table to store the commands in, the PHP script to create the commands (the integration into the other piece of software) and the PHP cron script that looks in the command table and executes each as it goes through.

On the WebMonkey site today, there's a new tutorial that looks at one of the most "pervasive" sites to come along in a long time, del.icio.us and how to interact with it's API via PHP.

Who's that with the catchy URL that's getting all the clicks?

Why, it's del.icio.us! No matter where you are on the "Web 2.0" lash or backlash, the pervasive influence of this little bookmark aggregator can't be denied.

The site offers a myriad ways of accessing its database, from HTML and RSS feeds, to JSON data, to browser integration of various types. Let's take a look at the public API, which offers flexible and easy access to del.icio.us.

In his example, he creates a script that, given the contents of an email message, filters out the URL, breaks it into its parts and sends it off to the del.icio.us API to be bookmarked under his account.