Emailing via SMTP

The QEmailServer class can be used to send email messages via any accessible SMTP server. Obviously, many PHP developers will be familiar with the PHP mail() function, which internally makes a shell call to sendmail. But note that for many reasons (including security, maintenance and deployability), QEmailServer does not use PHP's mail() nor does it use sendmail.

QEmailServer is an abstract class which only has static variables (which define the location of the SMTP server and other preferences) and a single static Send method. The Send method takes in a QEmailMessage object.

The QEmailMessage object contains the relavent email addresses (e.g. From, To, Cc and Bcc), as well as the subject and body. Note that the body can be in either plain text, HTML or both. QCubed will automatically handle the multipart message encoding for you.

You can easily add attachments to your message - using QEmailAttachment and its child classes, for example, QEmailStringAttachment. In the example below, we create a new QEmailStringAttachment object and then call Attach() on the QEmailMessage object - that's all it takes.

Finally, note that for development environments that do not have ready access to an SMTP server, the QEmailServer can be set to TestMode, where communication between the application and the SMTP server will be written to disk instead of an SMTP socket. This allows developers to develop and test email capability without actually sending out any emails.

Feel free to View Source the code. Note that the final Send call is commented out, so this page is actually non-functional. But you can view the code to get a sense as to how the QEmailServer and its associated QEmailMessage class work.