Terminally Incoherent

If you ever played around with the native PHP mail function, you will probably know that it’s functionality is very basic. Plain text emails work great, but if you want to do HTML email, you need to figure out what mail headers to send with your message. And if you want to send an attachment you need to base64 encode it yourself.

Good news is that you only need to implement it once. Even better news is, that almost every PHP developer out there already implemented their own email class at one point or another. Therefore, you should not be wasting time on this - just go out there and steal some code.

If you are shopping around for a good PHP email functionality I recommend PHPMailer. Why do I like it? Let me count the ways:

1. Easy to use
2. No Setup involved - just drop the class files in your include path
3. Let’s you sen attachments, html emails and etc without any thinking
4. Works with PHP4
5. Widely used (included in projects like Mambo, Moodle, PostNuke, Xoops and etc..
6. Well documented
7. Distributed under GPL

How easy to use is it? Let me show you. Here is a simple script that will send an email with an attachment:

<?php
require("class.phpmailer.php");
 
$mail = new PHPMailer();
$mail->From     = "you@example.com";
$mail->FromName = "Your Full Name";
$mail->Host     = "smtp.example.com";
$mail->Mailer   = "smtp";
 
$mail->AddAddress("someone@example.com");
$mail->AddCC("supervisor@example.com");
$mail->AddBCC("secret@example.com");
$mail->Subject = "This is Your Subject";
$mail->Body    = "This is your message";
$mail->AddAttachment("~/files/something.zip", "new_name.zip");  // optional name
 
if(!$mail->Send())
{
     echo "There was an error sending the message";
     exit;
}
 
echo "<p>Message was sent successfully</p>";
?>

How is that for simple? It’s a piece of cake! I have been using it for a while now, and I haven’t had any problems with it. So go and steal it today.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 12:05 pm and is filed under technology, programming, tips, php. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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