How to send e-mails from custom PHP code ?

Question

hi,

I need to send an e-mail from my custom php code using the Drupal service.

In other words, I've noticed Drupal can easily send emails so I would like to know how can I use drupal libraries to send the emails, instead of using external libraries.

thanks

Answer 1

You need to use the drupal_mail() function, and defined a hook_mail() in your module.

You'll then call the first one, and the e-mail informations will be set by the second one.
(See the example on the manual page of drupal_mail)

Answer 2

$message = array(
  'to' => '[email protected]',
  'subject' => t('Example subject'),
  'body' => t('Example body'),
  'headers' => array('From' => '[email protected]'),
);

drupal_mail_send($message);

Caveats:

• Because drupal_mail() isn't called, other modules will not be able to hook_mail_alter() your output, which can cause unexpected results.
• drupal_mail_send() is ignorant about which language to send the message in, so this needs to be figured out beforehand.
• You'll have to manually specify any other e-mail headers that are required ('Content-Type', etc.). These are normally taken care of for you by drupal_mail(). In the case where your module sends several different types of e-mails, and you want those e-mail templates to be editable (for example, user module's various registration notification/password reset/etc. e-mails), using hook_mail() is still the best way to go.

This is what reported in the comments section in the documentation for drupal_mail(). If the caveats are not important in your case, then you can use the reported snippet.

Answer 3

I would recommend to use mimemail. It's a contrib module that will allow you to send HTML mails (+ attachments) or plaintext-only messages with ease. Here is an excerpt from the readme file:

the mimemail() function:

• $sender - a user object or email address
• $recipient - a user object or email address
• $subject - subject line
• $body - body text in html format
• $plaintext - boolean, whether to send messages in plaintext-only (default false)

This module creates a user preference for receiving plaintext-only messages. This preference will be honored by all calls to mimemail()

Link: http://drupal.org/project/mimemail

I hope this will help you!