p. Everybody needs to send mail from their application at one point or another. It’s like using a database or a sledge-hammer, sooner or later, you are going to want to do it. But what’s the best tool? Yesterday I got an email from a “friend of mine”:http://www.sqlyog.com asking me this question. Since I respect him and his team and they didn’t know the answer, I figure there might be others out there who struggle with this.

p. In this overview I’m going to introduce you to some of the delights hidden away in PEAR’s Mail category. There are many useful classes in PEAR that can help save you time and money in your everyday use of PHP. Not least among these are the PEAR Mail classes. These classes are focused into two key areas: sending and MIME handling. First I’m going to elaborate on the sending classes, and then on the more complicated area of MIME handling. Following that, we will look at a couple of other useful bits of pre-written code.