How to Send an Email

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Sending emails is a classic task for any web application and one that has special complications and potential pitfalls. Instead of recreating the wheel, one solution to send emails is to use the SwiftmailerBundle, which leverages the power of the Swift Mailer library. This bundle comes with the Symfony Standard Edition.

Configuration

To use Swift Mailer, you'll need to configure it for your mail server.

Tip

Instead of setting up/using your own mail server, you may want to use a hosted mail provider such as Mandrill, SendGrid, Amazon SES or others. These give you an SMTP server, username and password (sometimes called keys) that can be used with the Swift Mailer configuration.

In a standard Symfony installation, some swiftmailer configuration is already included:

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# app/config/config.yml
swiftmailer:
    transport: '%mailer_transport%'
    host:      '%mailer_host%'
    username:  '%mailer_user%'
    password:  '%mailer_password%'

These values (e.g. %mailer_transport%), are reading from the parameters that are set in the parameters.yml file. You can modify the values in that file, or set the values directly here.

The following configuration attributes are available:

  • transport (smtp, mail, sendmail, or gmail)
  • username
  • password
  • host
  • port
  • encryption (tls, or ssl)
  • auth_mode (plain, login, or cram-md5)

  • spool

    • type (how to queue the messages, file or memory is supported, see How to Spool Emails)
    • path (where to store the messages)
  • delivery_addresses (an array of email addresses where to send ALL emails)
  • disable_delivery (set to true to disable delivery completely)

Caution

Starting from SwiftMailer 5.4.5, the mail transport is deprecated and will be removed in version 6. Consider using another transport like smtp, sendmail or gmail.

Sending Emails

The Swift Mailer library works by creating, configuring and then sending Swift_Message objects. The "mailer" is responsible for the actual delivery of the message and is accessible via the mailer service. Overall, sending an email is pretty straightforward:

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public function indexAction($name, \Swift_Mailer $mailer)
{
    $message = (new \Swift_Message('Hello Email'))
        ->setFrom('send@example.com')
        ->setTo('recipient@example.com')
        ->setBody(
            $this->renderView(
                // app/Resources/views/Emails/registration.html.twig
                'Emails/registration.html.twig',
                ['name' => $name]
            ),
            'text/html'
        )

        // you can remove the following code if you don't define a text version for your emails
        ->addPart(
            $this->renderView(
                'Emails/registration.txt.twig',
                ['name' => $name]
            ),
            'text/plain'
        )
    ;

    $mailer->send($message);

    // or, you can also fetch the mailer service this way
    // $this->get('mailer')->send($message);

    return $this->render(...);
}

To keep things decoupled, the email body has been stored in a template and rendered with the renderView() method. The registration.html.twig template might look something like this:

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{# app/Resources/views/Emails/registration.html.twig #}
<h3>You did it! You registered!</h3>

Hi {{ name }}! You're successfully registered.

{# example, assuming you have a route named "login" #}
To login, go to: <a href="{{ url('login') }}">...</a>.

Thanks!

{# Makes an absolute URL to the /images/logo.png file #}
<img src="{{ absolute_url(asset('images/logo.png')) }}">

The $message object supports many more options, such as including attachments, adding HTML content, and much more. Fortunately, Swift Mailer covers the topic of Creating Messages in great detail in its documentation.

Learn more

This work, including the code samples, is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.
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