Kevin Bond
Contributed by Kevin Bond in #44311

In HTML it's possible to create email links that, when clicked, open a new email message with some pre-filled information rather than linking to some other page:

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<!-- creates an empty email with only the recipient address pre-filled -->
<a href="mailto:someone@example.com">Send email</a>

<!-- creates an email with most of its elements pre-filled -->
<a href="mailto:someone@example.com
    ?cc=other@example.com
    &bcc=another@example.com
    &subject=Lorem%20Ipsum
    &body=Some%20content%20of%20the%20email">
  Send email
</a>

However, sometimes you need to create a full email, with lots of contents and even file attachments. You can't do that with the mailto: feature. That's why Symfony 6.1 will add a feature to create draft emails.

Draft emails are email messages created as a file with the .eml extension and with the X-Unsent header set. This allows email clients to interpret them as draft emails that you can use to create the email to be sent.

First, use the new DraftEmail class to create those emails:

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use Symfony\Component\Mime\DraftEmail;

$message = (new DraftEmail())
    // ...
    ->html($this->renderView('...'))
    ->attach('...');

Now you can define a controller that downloads this draft email as a .eml file:

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// src/Controller/DownloadEmailController.php
namespace App\Controller;

use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Controller\AbstractController;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\ResponseHeaderBag;
use Symfony\Component\Mime\DraftEmail;
use Symfony\Component\Routing\Annotation\Route;

class BudgetController extends AbstractController
{
    #[Route('/budget/estimate-generator/{clientId}')]
    public function estimateGenerator(): Response
    {
        // ...

        $message = (new DraftEmail())
            ->subject('Your estimate is now available')
            ->html($this->renderView('...'))
            ->attach('...');

        $response = new Response($message->toString());
        $contentDisposition = $response->headers->makeDisposition(
            ResponseHeaderBag::DISPOSITION_ATTACHMENT,
            'estimate.eml'
        );
        $response->headers->set('Content-Type', 'message/rfc822');
        $response->headers->set('Content-Disposition', $contentDisposition);

        return $response;
    }
}
Published in #Living on the edge