On NetTuts.com today there's a new tutorial showing you how to send text messages via SMS directly from your script to the user's cell phone.

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.

From the Web Development Blog today there's a new tutorial showing you how to use STMP from PHP via one of three different tools - the Zend_Mail component of the Zend Framework, SwiftMailer and PHPMailer.

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.

On the Web Development Blog there's a recent post about using the PHPMailer package to send email out via the Google Mail servers.

These days I tried some plugin to send mail message within bbpress via SMTP. Since my domains email is hosted with Google applications I decided to send my messages via the SMTP server from Gmail. I found several articles and tutorials, but a lot of them didn't work for me. [...] You need for this code example a PHP5 enabled web host (I tested only on Linux), the port 465 need to be open and of course you need a Gmail or Google applications account.

Complete code is provided - a smtpmailer function that takes in the standard mail parameters (to, from, subject, msg) and ships the message off to the Gmail STMP servers (on their custom port 465).

The Symfony project has released the latest version of their framework - Symfony 1.0.5 - largely a security fix release to help head off some issues that came up with the phpmailer utility.

I've just released symfony 1.0.5. If you use the symfony built-in phpmailer (and you do if you use the ->sendMail() method in your actions), you must upgrade to this release or apply the following patch: http://trac.symfony-project.com/trac/changeset/4380?format=diff&new=4380. PHPMailer has a remote command execution vulnerability if you have configured it to use sendmail. You can find more information about this issue here: http://larholm.com/2007/06/11/phpmailer-0day-remote-execution/

The easiest way to correct the issue is to just apply the patch to your current installation, but since there are other fixes included in the new version, you might opt for the update anyway.

In the never-ending stream of article series that comes out of DevShed, they've started up a new one today with part one of a look at creating an email client with PHP and implementing the full email functionality (reading/writing/attachments/etc).

In this four-part series of articles we are going to build an email client with PHP. I will try to implement a full email client with all the functionality that you would expect from an email client, which includes a trash folder, sent items folder and a draft folder. But that's not all.

In part one, they set things up - talking about how it will all work (using the PHPMailer class) and the creating of the database tables to store the data for the app including the messages and the user information.

As linked to by the Zend Developer Zone today, the MC|Press online site has a new article about the latest feature IBM has added to the PHP distributions on their System i servers - the mail() function.

PHP, the popular Web development language, has long provided a built-in function, mail(), to send email messages. Until recently, this function was available only on non-System i platforms. The limitation applied both to home-grown System i PHP versions and to beta releases of Zend Core for i5/OS (the PHP distribution by IBM and Zend).

Users of PHP on System i can now rejoice. The GA release of Zend Core for i5/OS, introduced in August 2006, implements mail().

They cover all aspects of why this is definitely a good thing. Developers tend to take this handy function for granted until they really need to interact with the outside world via emails. They take a brief look at what the mail function is, including how it's used, configuration settings for it, and some of the other alternatives that are offered (with advantages and disadvantages of choosing them).

Sending mail with PHP is a pretty simple process - well, sending simple mail is. What happens when you want to get a bit more complicated with things, like sending attachments or differenly encoded content inside your emails? There are many ways to integrate these kinds of things into your system, but this new post from the Zend Developer Zone suggests a few of the easiest.

Everybody needs to send mail from their application at one point or another. It's like using a database or a sledge-hammer, sooner or later, you are going to want to do it. But what's the best tool? Yesterday I got an email from a friend of mine asking me this question. Since I respect him and his team and they didn't know the answer, I figure there might be others out there who struggle with this. (It will come as no surprise to those of you who read this site regularly that this is not a comprehensive list but more of a primer to get you going. Comprehensive lists are just too hard.)

The software packages/functions that he mentions are:

• PHP's own mail function
• PEAR_Mail
• Zend_Mail from their Framework
• PHPMailer

For each, he offers a brief description, some of the features that it offers, and the "feeling" he gets from the pakcage (i.e. "Pear_Mail is like a compact car, it gets the job done with little or no frills").

GMail's "for your domain" email feature has already impressed quite a bit of the industry, but have you ever wished for something a little bit more? Have you wanted to be able to send things the same way, but from a PHP script? Vulgarisoip is here to help.

Now that GMail for your domain has arrived (if you're a lucky beta winner, that is) it's like hiring a world-class email server engineer and paying them nothing. It takes a little work because of GMail's security requirements, but you end up with a rock solid email server that won't send messages straight into spam folders.

He uses the PHPMailer pakcage to do the dirty work - ensuring the headers are correct and providing a simple API for your scripts to use. There's a brief code example with a small explaination, but there's really not that much to it - any coder could integrate it easily.

[digg it]

Richard Davey has this new post today on his blog with a look at integrating POP authentication into the PHPMailer package.

Although it provides sending via SMTP, it only supports direct SMTP Authentication. Which was great until an application I built moved host and needed "POP before SMTP" Authentication instead. So I wrote this class. I figured I'd post it here incase anyone else had a use for it.

This is built for PHP Mailer 1.72 and was not tested with any previous version. It was developed under PHP 4.3.11 (E_ALL). It works under PHP 5 and 5.1 with E_ALL, but not in Strict mode due to var deprecation (but then neither does PHP Mailer either!). It follows the RFC 1939 standard explicitly and is fully commented.

From there, he shows you how to use it, including the classes, creating a new POP3 object and setting the user/pass for it, as well as a little (quick) documentation on how to use it. You can grab the files for this update here.