Implement Mailing Component

[resurtm]

I remember @samdark said (IIRC at YiiConf 2012) that mailing component will be bundled with the Yii2. We should make decision what's the best approach after all: to create SwiftMailer/PHPMailer wrapper component OR to design from scratch something totally new.

Existing extensions, references and projects:

• http://www.yiiframework.com/extension/mail
• http://swiftmailer.org/
• http://phpmailer.worxware.com/
• http://framework.zend.com/manual/1.12/en/zend.mail.html

[qiangxue]

Not quite sure about this. On the one hand, mail is a crucial piece in an application. On the other hand, there are many good implementations already which are relatively easy to be used in a Yii-based application.

Developing one from scratch seems to be reinvent the wheels and it will take a lot of efforts to make a good mail component.

So most likely we should wrap an existing mail component, or do nothing at all and rely on user-contributed mail components and wrappers.

[allanfreitas]

@resurtm I agree with @qiangxue comment. It's better do nothing now about a mail component for Yii. It's a development waste of time, It's my opinion. You already gave us the best options for email components, and one yii extension.

[rcoelho]

I agree with @qiangxue.

Sending email from the Web server isn't appropriate in most scenarios. There are great email service providers out there, like MailChimp Mandrill, SendGrid, mailgun etc.
The framework should encourage the developer to choose a provider and send his email in a proper way.

Some providers have free tiers that are more than enough for simple, low traffic or in-development applications.

If one still wants to send the email from his own servers, there are very good libraries and extensions for that.

[mdomba]

I too agree, makes no sense to reinvent the wheel, especially if we cannot (re)invent anything special and/or different/better

[resurtm]

Hm, OK. Let's close this. :-)

[klimov-paul]

At my opinion Yii should have some standrd interface for the email sending.
General email sender architecture could be: a email message class and the email transport component.
By default email transport can simply use PHP "mail()" function, but still allows to be extended and overridden. So developer may create his own transport and implement it in the way he want: using Swift, using 3rd party API and so on.

[samdark]

Yeah, it will be good to have. This way, for example, we'll avoid using multiple email libraries for multiple extensions.

[klimov-paul]

It could look like:

$email = new EmailMessage();
$email->setFrom('...');
$email->addTo('...');
$email->setBody('...');
$email->send();

While "EmailMessage::send()" looks like:

class EmailMessage {
    public function send() {
        return Yii::app()->email->send($this);
    }
}

Yii could support just PHP mail as transport "from the box".
While developers could replace his transport by whatever they need.

[resurtm]

Extending EmailTarget class would also be much more consistent (with the rest application) and clear with this approach.

[qiangxue]

Sounds good to me. So we need a class to represent an email and a base transport class with default implementation using php mail. I think we are clear about the requirements now. How about naming them as Email and EmailService? Where is the best place to hold these class files?

[allanfreitas]

I've used CodeIgniter for many applications, and the mail class is simple and suport mail/smtp. I think, we could use the example: https://github.com/EllisLab/CodeIgniter/blob/develop/system/libraries/Email.php,
to Yii implementation.

[resurtm]

@klimov-paul:

class EmailMessage { public function send() { /* ... */ } }

Message sending itself? In my opinion this is not responsibility of the message.

[navarr]

@resurtm Mayhaps not, but it makes as much sense for an EmailMessage to send as it does for an ActiveRecord to save.