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Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 18:38:36 -0400
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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.

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]