Email with PHP

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. This article is the first part of a five-part series.

While using MIME email with PHP is a pretty fun process, the bad news is that it can be quite challenging to implement, particularly if you're not very familiar with its most complex facets. There's also the possibility that you often find yourself writing the same annoying code over and over again, especially when you have to construct MIME email modules within your applications.

In either case, one thing is certain: creating MIME email-related scripts with PHP is one of those things that you'll only want to do once in your lifetime. Suppose you're sick of writing code used to send MIME email to your customers and wish to find a more practical solution to this task. Well, you could pick up one of the numerous third-party classes that are available on the web, or develop your own fine-tuned MIME email class that can be reused many times in the future.

If you have any interest in the last option, then you'll find this article series pretty useful. In the different tutorials that comprise it, I'll teach you how to build a modular MIME mailer class with PHP 5. It will be equipped with a bunch of intuitive methods that are useful for handling the most common tasks associated with sending MIME email.

In this first part of the series, I'll walk you through creating the bare bones structure of the mailer class, and I'll be progressively adding more to it in upcoming articles.

Now, let's move forward and learn how to build a reusable MIME mailer class with PHP. Here we go!