The Laravel News site has a post that gives you a quick introduction to MailThief, a library created by the developers at Tighten Co. to make mail testing simpler.

MailThief is a new package by Tighten Co. that provides a fake mailer for your Laravel application. This makes it easy to test email without actually sending any.

They include a simple example of a script that sends an email on user registration using Laravel's own Mail library. They also include a test for the registration action showing how MailThief can be used to "hijack" the mailer and make it simpler to get information about the mail being sent. You can find out more about the tool and what prompted it in this video from Adam Wathan.

On WebReference.com today there's a new tutorial about creating a PHP interface for sending and receiving emails directly from a mailer script.

In this tutorial you will learn how to create your own PHP Web mailer. You will learn the necessary steps for creating an email account and making connections to the server protocols for sending and receiving email. You also will get a listing of PHP commands that you can use to customize the Web mailer to your specifications.

The script makes manual connections to the servers instead of using something like mail and sends the raw commands to send via an SMTP server and fetch over a POP3 connection. There's also an example of making an IMAP connection and sending commands to get the current list of messages, current status and fetch the messages.

On DevShed today, there's a new tutorial that seeks to show you how to create a MIME mailer class in PHP.

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...

On DevShed today, there's a new tutorial that seeks to show you how to create a MIME mailer class in PHP.

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...