Zend_Mail provides generalized functionality to compose and send both text and MIME-compliant multipart e-mail messages. Mail can be sent with Zend_Mail via the default Zend_Mail_Transport_Sendmail transport or via Zend_Mail_Transport_Smtp.

<?php
require_once 'Zend/Mail.php';
$mail = new Zend_Mail();
$mail->setBodyText('This is the text of the mail.');
$mail->setFrom('somebody@example.com', 'Some Sender');
$mail->addTo('somebody_else@example.com', 'Some Recipient');
$mail->setSubject('TestSubject');
$mail->send();
            

Note: Minimum definitions
In order to send an e-mail with Zend_Mail you have to specify at least one recipient, a sender (e.g., with setFrom()), and a message body (text and/or HTML).

For most mail attributes there are "get" methods to read the information stored in the mail object. For further details, please refer to the API documentation. A special one is getRecipients(). It returns an array with all recipient e-mail addresses that were added prior to the method call.

For security reasons, Zend_Mail filters all header fields to prevent header injection with newline (\n) characters.

You also can use most methods of the Zend_Mail object with a convenient fluent interface. A fluent interface means that each method returns a reference to the object on which it was called, so you can immediately call another method.

<?php
require_once 'Zend/Mail.php';
$mail = new Zend_Mail();
$mail->setBodyText('This is the text of the mail.')
    ->setFrom('somebody@example.com', 'Some Sender')
    ->addTo('somebody_else@example.com', 'Some Recipient')
    ->setSubject('TestSubject')
    ->send();
        

The default transport for a Zend_Mail instance is Zend_Mail_Transport_Sendmail. It is essentially a wrapper to the PHP » mail() function. If you wish to pass additional parameters to the » mail() function, simply create a new transport instance and pass your parameters to the constructor. The new transport instance can then act as the default Zend_Mail transport, or it can be passed to the send() method of Zend_Mail.

<?php
require_once 'Zend/Mail.php';
require_once 'Zend/Mail/Transport/Sendmail.php';

$tr = new Zend_Mail_Transport_Sendmail('-freturn_to_me@example.com');
Zend_Mail::setDefaultTransport($tr);

$mail = new Zend_Mail();
$mail->setBodyText('This is the text of the mail.');
$mail->setFrom('somebody@example.com', 'Some Sender');
$mail->addTo('somebody_else@example.com', 'Some Recipient');
$mail->setSubject('TestSubject');
$mail->send();
            

Note: Safe mode restrictions
The optional additional parameters will be cause the » mail() function to fail if PHP is running in safe mode.