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.

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.

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).

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).

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.

• 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.

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.

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.

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.

For this project, I needed a form to send an email to the client once it's been validated and checked to be ok. [...] I decided to spice things up a bit with a little AJAX and a few effects from Scriptaculous. So let's dive into exactly how I did it.

They create their form first - a standard user info type of thing - and set it up to use the WForms validation script in PHP. They include the Javascript the script needs to run the validation and to handle sending the form's contents back out via an email.