I think a staging environment is more appropriate to actually have email being sent out. Nevertheless, it has made testing any email functionality a little cumbersome. I've done a little research, and have found two ways to tackle the problem. I've also included code samples and other resources to get you started.

The first method - the transport class - uses the Zend_Mail_Transport component (and interfaces) to set the transport for the application and handle the routing from an extension of the Abstract class. The second method involves changes to system settings in the php.ini and adding in a simple script to force a forward to the right address. Windows users can also use fakemail to accomplish a similar thing.

While each of these [PEAR Mail, PhpMailer, SwiftMailer, Zend_Mail] will work with Solar, the new Solar_Mail and Solar_Smtp packages work "natively", in that they support automatic configuration, locale and exception inheritance, and so on. Read on for some examples on how to use them.

In his example he sets up and sends a simple message, setting the contents of the email (sent as an HTML message). Since there's been much talk about the safety of a lot of the mailing systems in frameworks, Paul talks about how it's been secured from header injections, through safe attachments, and from a transport dependency-injection for SMTP.

There's even a method included that lets you take the SMTP information out of the script and put it into the Solar configuration file to use in the entire application.