silverstripe-framework/docs/en/topics/email.md

Email

SilverStripe has emailing functionality using the built-in mail() function in PHP. Features include sending plaintext- and HTML emails, sending bulk emails, subscription, handling bounced back emails.

Configuration

Your PHP configuration needs to include the SMTP module for sending emails. If you are not running an SMTP server together with your webserver, you might need to setup PHP with the credentials for an external SMTP server (see PHP documentation for mail()).

Usage

Sending combined HTML and Plaintext

By default, emails are sent in both HTML and Plaintext format. A plaintext representation is automatically generated from the system by stripping HTML markup, or transforming it where possible (e.g. <strong>text</strong> is converted to *text*).

:::php
$email = new Email($from, $to, $subject, $body);
$email->send();

The default HTML template is located in framework/templates/email/GenericEmail.ss.

Sending Plaintext only

:::php
$email = new Email($from, $to, $subject, $body);
$email->sendPlain();

Templates

• Create a SS-template file called, in this example we will use 'MyEmail.ss' inside mysite/templates/email.
• Fill this out with the body text for your email. You can use any SS-template syntax (e.g. <% loop %>, <% if %>, $FirstName etc)
• Choose your template with setTemplate()
• Populate any custom data into the template before sending with populateTemplate()

Example:

:::php
$email = new Email($from, $to, $subject, $body);
$email->setTemplate('MyEmail');

// You can call this multiple times or bundle everything into an array, including DataSetObjects
$email->populateTemplate(Member::currentUser());

$welcomeMsg = 'Thank you for joining on '.date('Y-m-d'.'!');

$email->populateTemplate(array(
	'WelcomeMessage' => $welcomeMsg, // Accessible in template via $WelcomeMessage
));

$email->send();

Subclassing

Class definition:

:::php
<?php
class MyEmail extends Email{
  protected
    $to = '$Email', // Be sure to encase this in single-quotes, as it is evaluated later by the template parser
    $from = 'email@email.com',
    $ss_template = 'MyEmail';
}

Usage:

:::php
<?php
$email = new MyEmail();
$email->populateTemplate(Member::currentUser()); // This will populate the template, $to, $from etc variables if they exist
$email->send(); // Will immediately send an HTML email with appropriate plain-text content

Administrator Emails

The static function Email::setAdminEmail() can be called from a _config.php file to set the address that these emails should originate from. This address is used if the from field is empty.

Redirecting Emails

• Email::send_all_emails_to($address) will redirect all emails sent to the given address. Handy for testing!

• Email::cc_all_emails_to() and Email::bcc_all_emails_to() will keep the email going to its original recipients, but add an additional recipient in the BCC/CC header. Good for monitoring system-generated correspondence on the live systems.

  :::php if(Director::isLive()) Email::bcc_all_emails_to("client@example.com"); else Email::send_all_emails_to("developer@example.com");

Setting Custom Headers

For email headers which do not have getters or setters (like setTo(), setFrom()) you can use addCustomHeader($header, $value)

:::php
$email = new Email(...);
$email->addCustomHeader('HeaderName', 'HeaderValue');
..

See Wikipedia E-mail Message header for a list of header names.

Newsletters

The newsletter module provides a UI and logic to send batch emails.

API Documentation

[api:Email]