In a new article from PHPBuilder.com today, they author introduces you to the methods you can use in your scripts to send mail to an external source.

Communicating with website users via email is crucial to the success of any online service. The ability to deliver registration confirmations and newsletters, provide a convenient and relatively secure password recovery tool, and keep clients updated with shipping status reports are just a few of the reasons for incorporating email-based features into your website infrastructure. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to incorporate email delivery capabilities into your PHP applications via both its native mail command and a great third-party extension called HTML Mime Mail. I'll conclude the article with a few pointers regarding how to most efficiently carry out bulk email delivery.

As mentioned, he starts simple, illustrating how the mail() function works and how to send headers and content with it. From there, he jumps over to using HTML Mime Email (a phpGuru package) that will allow you to easily enhance the mail() functionality to send emails with attachments or even ones with HTML-foramtting. Used in the rigth way, the mailing functionality in PHP can be one of the most useful tools you can have. Not only is it great for just general user interaction, but, when used for reporting and logging, it can keep you up-to-date on exactly what's going on with your site...