Welcome to the fourth episode of the series, "Sending MIME email with PHP." In this article, I’m going to show you how to provide the MIME mailer class with the ability to send email messages in HTML format. This will greatly extend its functionality, so don't miss this tutorial.
The Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (short for MIME) permits, among other things, sending email messages in HTML format, working with different types of attached files, and so forth. But, the good news here is that you can use all the features offered by MIME directly with PHP. You can develop applications that dispatch MIME-compliant messages to a bunch of recipients.
Naturally, sending MIME email with PHP can be done using either a procedural or an object-oriented approach. If you’re interested in utilizing this latter, you’ll find a friendly guide on building a highly modular MIME mailer class in this series of articles. It utilizes this extension in order to send messages in both plain text and HTML format. It also supports working with file attachments.
At this point, I should assume that you’re well aware of the goals of this series. Thus, it’s an excellent time to rehash the topics covered in the last tutorial, in case you haven't had the chance to read it yet. In that particular article, I demonstrated how to improve the signature of the MIME mailer class that I built in the beginning of this series by adding a brand new property, called “$mimeTypes,” to it. This helped store all the MIME types supported by the class, when dealing with file attachments.
Of course, after introducing this minor modification to the signature of the aforementioned mailer class, its whole structure looked more compact and more efficient. Nonetheless, my primary intention here is to teach you how to create an expansible PHP class that takes real advantage of the MIME extension.
When displaying an e-mail address on a website you obviously want to obfuscate it to avoid it getting harvested by spammers. But which obfuscation method is the best one? I drove a test to find out. Here are the results ...
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. This article is the first part of a five-part series.
While using MIME email with PHP is a pretty fun process, the bad news is that it can be quite challenging to implement, particularly if you're not very familiar with its most complex facets. There's also the possibility that you often find yourself writing the same annoying code over and over again, especially when you have to construct MIME email modules within your applications.
Sending plain text email with PHP is a pretty simple task that can be tackled with minor efforts thanks mostly to the easy learning curve of its popular “mail()” built-in function. You know, you code a simple script that sends email messages to a bunch of recipients. It feeds this function with the proper email headers and the text of the message and… voila! The script works like a charm, and best of all, it only took a few minutes to be developed.
However, things get slightly more complicated when it comes to sending email messages in HTML, or when it’s necessary to work with attachments, since these tasks require the use of MIME, which is the mail extension that permits you to send messages formatted in HTML, include inline files, and so forth.
The good news concerning the use of MIME email with PHP is that you can develop your own reusable functions in order to send messages in HTML and handle a huge variety of attachments. You can also take advantage of the object-oriented paradigm and create a highly modular MIME mailer class that does all of this hard work for you.
I’ve recently switched from Swift Mailer to Zend_Mail and to be honest, I’m loving it. Finally someone developed a lightweight, powerful and easy to use email component! Zend_Mail creates and sends e-mail messages with the format text or HTML and it allows e-mail to be sent in an easy form while preventing mail injection. Zend_Mime is a support set for handling multi-part MIME messages.
A couple very basic concepts of PHP must be discussed before getting into this project further. First, PHP code is inserted into pages inside <?php and ?> tags. Second, any page that contains any amount of those tags should have the a file extension of either .php, .php3, .php4, or .php5. The .php3 extension is for pages that are using features that were new to version 3 of PHP, and so on. Check with your system administrator for any rules regarding which extension you need to use and the tags you need to enclose the code, because PHP is also designed to be custom configured to fit the way you are comfortable coding. It can be configured to use the ASP <% %> tags amongst other customizations that are beyond the scope of this article.
PHP pages can still contain a lot of typical HTML, so your pages will still need the basic <html>, <body>, etc. tags. They just may not be right at the top like you are used to seeing because there may be PHP variables and such being defined before the <html> tag. Also, if you do a view source at the client level, you will only see the HTML and client-side scripting, because by that time all the PHP has been read and processed by the server and the resulting HTML is fed to the browser.
With all that being understood, let's get on with the fun stuff.
Most modern email client software includes a function whereby a user can send an email "return receipt requested." This is supposed to email the sender (you) to notify you when your email has been read by the recipient.
The problem is that depending on the email client software that your recipient is using, he or she will most likely be given the option to suppress that return-receipt from being sent back to you. This renders the return-receipt system almost completely unreliable as a means of detecting when someone has read your email.
If you have access to a web server that's running PHP, you can make your own return-receipt system that is (almost) guaranteed to work. What's more, you can even generate a mass email from PHP, with each email having its own uniquely-distinguishable return receipt, thereby allowing you to keep tabs on which recipients have read the email and which have not.
Email is the most popular Internet service today. A plenty of emails are sent and delivered each day. The goal of this tutorial is to demonstrate how to generate and send emails in PHP.
So, you want to send automated email messages from your PHP application. This can be in direct response to a user's action, such as signing up for your site, or a recurring event at a set time, such as a monthly newsletter. Sometimes email contains file attachments, both plain text and HTML portions, and so on. To understand how to send each variation that may exist on an email, we will start with the simple example and move to the more complicated.
* Sending a Simple Text Email
* Sending HTML Email
* Sending Email with Attachments
Note that to send email with PHP you need a working email server that you have permission to use: for Unix machines, this is often Sendmail; for Windows machines, you must set the SMTP directive in your php.ini file to point to your email server.
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I guess many developers could have the same challenge: Their customers want to send out a newsletter, but they don’t need an enterprise newsletter system because they send only to about 100 - 5.000 recipients. Futhermore, they wanna send it through their normal CMS application.
Here are some tips about writing a solid solution for sending a newsletter, which fit into the most requirements.
In this article, the fourth and final one of our series covering the creation of a PHP email application, we are going to look at the code for some of the remaining pages of the mail application. Chief among these is the NewMsg.php page, which is where items, to be more precise, new messages, are either saved as drafts or saved as sent messages.
