Re: Proposal: Mail Handling, feedback requested

On 03/24/2014 11:06 PM, Stas Malyshev wrote:

Hi!

Current e-mail handling in PHP is dreadful. Almost every framework implements it's own email handling class in order to make sending e-mail reliable, easy to configure, and to implement multiple mail schemes.

That is probably because sending mail involves more than just passing a stream of bytes to SMTP server. There's MIME, encodings, headers, etc. which all need to be taken care of. There's email server configurations. There's error handling.

Thanks for the detailed feedback Stas! After thinking over your questions a bit, I realized that I combined multiple features into one item - and while I would like to see all those features in PHP, the primary issue is Mail Handlers. IE when a PHP program invokes: mail( $to, $subject, $message ); Instead of running the rough equivalent of exec('mail -s $subject $to < $message') the PHP engine should invoke a registered callable in the same manner as it currently handles errors, streams, and sessions. The default mail handler is merely the current mail handler. From a coding perspective, this means that there only needs to be a single extra function added: mixed set_mail_handler ( callable $mail_handler ) Providing a base MailHandler class along with some implementations would be best done with a seperate RFC to avoid confusion. The same with MailMessage. The only additional item I might place in the RFC would be possibly adding blackhole and maildrop callables as blackhole is extremely useful for development purposes and maildrop is a feature I have long lamented that no language seems to provide[when you have an app which generates and sends over a million emails in the course of a single day maildrop is the only way to maintain performance]