PHP has a very simple mail function which is used very often for basic text mail messages. What if you need to attach files or if you need to send your e-mail messages via SMTP? Than it's time to use a more advanced script. This is because the standard mail function has only limited standard capabilities.

Snippets of code are included for each of the three showing how to send a simple email with the usual "To", "From" and body contents. All of the tools have the ability to include attachments, but that's not included here.

This is a great honor for me to take over such a project. The Swift Mailer project has been initiated by Chris Corbyn some years ago. He has done a wonderful job during the years, trying to find the best way to create a top-notch emailing solution for PHP. With the release of the 4th version of Swift Mailer earlier this year, I think we now have a very solid mailing library.

As a part of the effort to expand the use of the mailing library, it will become the default emailing solution for the Symfony framework. You can learn more about Swift Mailer from the project's website.

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 Mail component!

He includes an example or two showing a basic mailer script, one that uses a fluent interface, one sending an HTML email and two that show how to use a remote SMTP server.

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.

Our special guest today is Chris Corbyn. Chris is a professional Software Engineer based in the United Kingdom. He is fluent in PHP, JavaScript, XHTML as well as database design and management. In his spare time, Chris enjoys Snooker and Badminton.

Chris is going to talk to us about his open source project, SwiftMailer and how it can help you in your PHP applications.

The show mentions both SwiftMailer and the the PHP Developer's Network. You can grab the download directly from here or just subscribe to the podcast's feed here.

I would still advise you read the Swift Mailer documentation here: http://www.swiftmailer.org/docs/ SwiftMailer Component isn't an attempt to hide the already excellent class written by Chris Corbyn. Rather, the component tries to integrate and extend it (read, Cake-ish!).

They walk through the installation and where to unpack the download to ensure it works with your installation of CakePHP. You'll need to add the component to the main controller, but other than that, you're ready to go. From there it's configuration issues:

• connecting to the local MTA (like sendmail or a SMTP server)
• configuring the authentication for sending
• and, of course, creating a message to go out