# Introduction

## Getting started

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.

Simple E-Mail with Zend_Mail

A simple e-mail consists of some recipients, a subject, a body and a sender. To send such a mail using Zend_Mail_Transport_Sendmail, do the following:

    $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();

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. Double quotation is changed to single quotation and angle brackets to square brackets in the name of sender and recipients. If the marks are in email address, the marks will be removed.

You also can use most methods of the Zend_Mail object with a convenient fluent interface.

    $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();

## Configuring the default sendmail transport

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.

Passing additional parameters to the Zend_Mail_Transport_Sendmail transport

This example shows how to change the Return-Path of the mail() function.

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

Safe mode restrictions

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

Sendmail Transport and Windows

As the PHP manual states the mail() function has different behaviour on Windows and on *nix based systems. Using the Sendmail Transport on Windows will not work in combination with addBcc(). The mail() function will sent to the BCC recipient such that all the other recipients can see him as recipient!

Therefore if you want to use BCC on a windows server, use the SMTP transport for sending!