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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Proposal: Mail Handling, feedback requested
From: garyamort@gmail.com (Gary Mort)

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.
>

Sending mail is just passing a stream of bytes to a stream.  That stream 
could be an SMTP server, it can be an executable program, or it can be a 
file.

Generating proper Mime attachments, encoding, headers, etc deal with 
e-mail formatting and will affect how mail is displayed- but their 
impact on mail delivery should be non-existant!
See RFC2822, https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2822#section-3.5
The only elements you need for e-mail delivery is a recipient and a 
message.  Subject, from, headers, etc are all optional.

Note 'should be' - in practice they MAY have an impact depending on to 
what MDA[Mail Delivery Agent] PHP is submitting the message.  The MDA 
/may/ extrapolate missing information from the header fields and it 
/may/ modify the header fields.   This message is a good example, if you 
are receiving individual list messages you will have 2 copies[the one I 
sent to the list and the one I sent to you]  - you can compare the 
headers and see how the mail list[which itself is an MDA] modified the 
headers from the originals.



>> class MailMessage {
>>
>> /* Properties */
>> $private array $recipients;
>> $private string $sender;
>> $private string $subject;
>> $private string $body;
>> $private string $header;
>
> What is "header"? If it's a content of whole header, then a) it already
> includes all previous fields except "body" and b) you'd still need a
> user class to actually make any use of it
> Does it mean if I set $header it would automatically set all the rest of
> the fields contained there? Does it mean if I set $subject $header would
> automatically be updated?

Good point, there are a couple of extra parameters/properties:
$recipients['cc'], and $recipients['bcc'].  Everything else maps 
directly to the current mail function.   Those 2 properties are mapped 
implicitly for the mail function today.

bool mail ( string $to , string $subject , string $message [, string 
$additional_headers [, string $additional_parameters ]] )

CC and BCC today must be placed manually in $additional_parameters today 
and under this proposal, you can still do that when using the mail() 
function.

If, however you decide to use the MailMessage class, you have the option 
of specifying them directly through setRecipients().

Beyond that, everything functions in the same manner as it does today. 
IE $header has no direct relationship to $subject, $to, or $from.

Frameworks are encouraged to subclass MailMessage and extend it's 
functionality to suite their requirements - ie if they to synchronize 
the header property with the recipients/from/subject properties they are 
free to do so - there is no rule/standard saying they cannot.



$mail = new MailMessage(null, $subject, $body, $headers, $from, 
$parameters);
$mail->setRecipients($recipients);
$mail->sendBatch();

Would be equivalent to:
// Calculate the message TO recipients
$to = implode(','.$recipients['to']);

// Update parameters with optional cc recipients
$cc = implode(',',$recipients['cc']);
$parameters .= (!empty($cc)) ? ' -c '.$cc : '';


// Update parameters with optional bcc recipients
$bcc = implode(',',$recipients['bcc']);
$parameters .= (!empty($cc)) ? ' -b '.$bcc : '';

mail($to, $subject, $body, $headers, $parameters);


Which incidentally, could be emulated using exec as follows:
/* A message consists of a header followed by an optional body.
Must be seperated by a CRLF
*/
$message = $headers ? $headers .CRLF . $body : $body;

// Mail command
$mailcommand = 'mail';
// Add subject
$mailcommand .= ' -s '.$subject;

// Add extra parameters
mailcommand .= '$parameters';

// Add to recipients
$mailcommand .= ' '.$to;

// Add the messsage
$mailcommand .= ' < '.escapeshellarg($message);

// Send the message
exec($mailcommand);