Sending a multi-part email with ZendMail is easy enough, but if you want to send an HTML email with a text alternative, you need to remember to set the content-type in the headers to multipart/alternative. As this is the second time I had to work this out, I'm noting it here for the next time I forget!

The rest of the post is the code you'll need to send a simple email with a text and HTML body sections, configure the headers (to, from, etc) and the "multipart/alternative" header to make the HTML or plain text switching work correctly.

While developing web applications on localhost you must have always missed the functionality to send mails. As localhost does not support email service, so it has always been a bottleneck for email testing on localhost. But I have found a simple way to test emails on localhost using PHP. I have overridden the default mail() function of PHP to create a text/html file based on the email format. If the email is in html format, an HTML file is created otherwise a text file is created. You can see in this file what exactly is the content sent in your mail. See how does it work.

He shows how to override the mail function with your own custom "mail" function, just in a difference namespace. He includes the sample code to send the email (the "mail" function), a basic HTML template you can use and and example of it in use.

PHP's mail() function is a very useful and powerful function, even to the point that it is very easy to exploit. A way hackers exploit this function is a method called email header injection. [...] I'm sure most of you can already tell that's not going to be pretty since we didn't check the user input and so forth. PHP provides us with functions such as filter_var which will validate user input and either return false if the validation fails or return the filtered data.

He includes an example of using this filtering methods to check the user input for malicious information - validating that the "to" address is a valid email (FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL) and a sanitize() method that removes things like newlines, carriage returns and a few other characters.

Text messaging has become extremely widespread throughout the world - to the point where an increasing number of web applications have integrated SMS to notify users of events, sales or coupons directly through their mobile devices. In this tutorial, we will cover the fundamentals of sending text messages with PHP.

Their method "cheats" a little bit and uses an interface many of the cell phone providers offer to their subscribers - a link from an email address to SMS. Most providers have their domains you can send the email to and have it automatically forwarded to the user's cell as a text. Thankfully, this requires nothing more than the mail function to accomplish. They include the sample code and HTML+CSS to make a basic form as well as mention PHPMailer as a more powerful mailing alternative.

Some friends of mine publish a literary journal that accepts submissions via email. At their request I wrote a script to download messages from the journal's Gmail account and do some simple parsing tasks. Most of the submissions are made using an HTML form and a corresponding mailer script on their website, so I knew the precise format of the incoming messages (see Figure 1). What I didn't know was how to access Gmail in PHP.

He tried out the libgmailer script first, but ran into roadblocks until he realized he could use something PHP already had - the imap functions. With these he shows how to make a connection to the Gmail servers, get the listing of messages and pull out the body for the one you want to parse.

Previously it was a simple trek to a website to download a Windows build of sendmail.exe, but for some reason I cannot get access to it, so I have to go another route. Enter hMailServer, a free, full-featured SMTP/POP/IMAP server for Windows with a pretty, shiny GUI configuration interface. All I really want to do is setup SMTP for localhost only but one could easily use hMailServer as a production mail server.

He includes the details (along with some screenshots) to get the hMainServer software up and running. Thanks to the simple GUI the tool offers you can be up and working in a few clicks - oh, and a change to your php.ini file.

In most hosting environments, the PHP mail() function is sufficient to send e-mail messages without problems. However, there are situations on which using the mail function is inconvenient and may prevent that your messages reach the destination. [...] Therefore, you may need to find an alternative way for sending your e-mail messages from PHP.

The package lets you define a username/password, server, whether to use a SSL connection or not, and if the connection needs to use the TLS protocol.

A lot of functionality is shared among applications - like sending emails or preventing spam. In the spirit of reusing the wheel instead of reinventing it, here are nine free web libraries that you can use in your next program which will dramatically increase your efficiency.

Here's their list:

• ReCAPTCHA
• Akismet
• Services_JSON
• Smarty
• pChart
• SimplePie
• XML-RPC PHP Library
• Amazon S3
• PHPMailer

Screenshots (and code examples) are provided for several of the items as well as links to their website and documentation pages.

I've finally got of my ass and committed my mail logging patch I've written almost 2 years ago. This functionality is predominantly aimed at shared hosters that often have a problem identifying people who abuse the mail() function to send an in-ordinate amount of spam or hacked scripts used for the some purpose. The logging functionality is disabled by default but can be enabled on a per-directory or globally via 2 INI settings.

A new directive in your php.ini file (mail.log) lets you specify where the mail log needs to go. You can also use the mail.add_x_header setting to add in a mail header with the name of the script that sent it (and the UID).

It will be included in PHP 5.3 but if you're running PHP 5.2 and want to get a jump on it, here's the patch.

Email plays a crucial role in website development, whether you'd like to confirm a new registrant's email address, recover a lost password, or provide prospective clients with a convenient means to contact you. [...] In this tutorial, I'll introduce you to several solutions for sending email using PHP, including PHP's native mail() function, PEAR's Mail package, and the Zend Framework.

He starts with some of the fundamentals of mail - the difference between POP3 and SMTP, Sendmail, etc - before moving on to an example of the mail function's usage. He does the same with the PEAR Mail package and the Zend_Mail component of the Zend Framework.