Mailer

• class Cake\Mailer\Mailer(string|array|null $profile = null)

Mailer is a convenience class for sending email. With this class you can sendemail from any place inside of your application.

Basic Usage

First of all, you should ensure the class is loaded:

use Cake\Mailer\Mailer;

After you’ve loaded Mailer, you can send an email with the following:

$mailer = new Mailer('default');
$mailer->setFrom(['me@example.com' => 'My Site'])
    ->setTo('you@example.com')
    ->setSubject('About')
    ->deliver('My message');

Since Mailer’s setter methods return the instance of the class, you are ableto set its properties with method chaining.

Mailer has several methods for defining recipients - setTo(), setCc(),setBcc(), addTo(), addCc() and addBcc(). The main difference beingthat the first three will overwrite what was already set and the latter will justadd more recipients to their respective field:

$mailer = new Mailer();
$mailer->setTo('to@example.com', 'To Example');
$mailer->addTo('to2@example.com', 'To2 Example');
// The email's To recipients are: to@example.com and to2@example.com
$mailer->setTo('test@example.com', 'ToTest Example');
// The email's To recipient is: test@example.com

Choosing the Sender

When sending email on behalf of other people, it’s often a good idea to define theoriginal sender using the Sender header. You can do so using setSender():

$mailer = new Mailer();
$mailer->setSender('app@example.com', 'MyApp emailer');

Note

It’s also a good idea to set the envelope sender when sending mail on anotherperson’s behalf. This prevents them from getting any messages aboutdeliverability.

Configuration

Configuration for Mailer defaults is created using setConfig() andTransportFactory::setConfig(). You should put your mailer profiles in theconfig/app.php file. The config/app.default.php file is anexample of this file. It is not required to define email configuration inconfig/app.php. Mailer can be used without it and use the respectivemethods to set all configurations separately or load an array of configs.

By defining profiles and transports, you can keep your application code free ofconfiguration data, and avoid duplication that makes maintenance and deploymentmore difficult.

To load a predefined configuration, you can use the setProfile() method or pass itto the constructor of Mailer:

$mailer = new Mailer();
$mailer->setProfile('default');
 
// Or in constructor
$mailer = new Mailer('default');

Instead of passing a string which matches a preset configuration name, you canalso just load an array of options:

$mailer = new Mailer();
$mailer->setProfile(['from' => 'me@example.org', 'transport' => 'my_custom']);
 
// Or in constructor
$mailer = new Mailer(['from' => 'me@example.org', 'transport' => 'my_custom']);

Configuration Profiles

Defining delivery profiles allows you to consolidate common email settings intore-usable profiles. Your application can have as many profiles as necessary. Thefollowing configuration keys are used:

• 'from': Mailer or array of sender. See Mailer::setFrom().
• 'sender': Mailer or array of real sender. See Mailer::setSender().
• 'to': Mailer or array of destination. See Mailer::setTo().
• 'cc': Mailer or array of carbon copy. See Mailer::setCc().
• 'bcc': Mailer or array of blind carbon copy. See Mailer::setBcc().
• 'replyTo': Mailer or array to reply the e-mail. See Mailer::setReplyTo().
• 'readReceipt': Mailer address or an array of addresses to receive thereceipt of read. See Mailer::readReceipt().
• 'returnPath': Mailer address or an array of addresses to return if havesome error. See Mailer::setReturnPath().
• 'messageId': Message ID of e-mail. See Mailer::setMessageId().
• 'subject': Subject of the message. See Mailer::setSubject().
• 'message': Content of message. Do not set this field if you are using rendered content.
• 'priority': Priority of the email as numeric value (usually from 1 to 5 with 1 being the highest).
• 'headers': Headers to be included. See Mailer::setHeaders().
• 'viewRender': If you are using rendered content, set the view classname.See Mailer::viewRender().
• 'template': If you are using rendered content, set the template name. SeeViewBuilder::setTemplate().
• 'theme': Theme used when rendering template. See ViewBuilder::setTheme().
• 'layout': If you are using rendered content, set the layout to render. Ifyou want to render a template without layout, set this field to null. SeeViewBuilder::setTemplate().
• 'viewVars': If you are using rendered content, set the array withvariables to be used in the view. See Mailer::setViewVars().
• 'attachments': List of files to attach. See Mailer::setAttachments().
• 'emailFormat': Format of email (html, text or both). See Mailer::setEmailFormat().
• 'transport': Transport configuration name. See Configuring Transports.
• 'log': Log level to log the email headers and message. true will useLOG_DEBUG. See also Using Levels.
• 'helpers': Array of helpers used in the email template. ViewBuilder::setHelpers().

Note

The values of above keys using Mailer or array, like from, to, cc, etc will be passedas first parameter of corresponding methods. The equivalent for:$mailer->setFrom('my@example.com', 'My Site')would be defined as 'from' => ['my@example.com' => 'My Site'] in your config

Setting Headers

In Mailer you are free to set whatever headers you want. Do not forget toput the X- prefix for your custom headers.

See Mailer::setHeaders() and Mailer::addHeaders()

Sending Templated Emails

Emails are often much more than just a simple text message. In orderto facilitate that, CakePHP provides a way to send emails using CakePHP’sview layer.

The templates for emails reside in a special folder templates/email of yourapplication. Mailer views can also use layouts and elements just like normal views:

$mailer = new Mailer();
$mailer = $mailer
            ->setMailerFormat('html')
            ->setTo('bob@example.com')
            ->setFrom('app@domain.com')
            ->viewBuilder()
                ->setTemplate('welcome', 'fancy');
 
$mailer->deliver();

The above would use templates/email/html/welcome.php for the viewand templates/layout/email/html/fancy.php for the layout. You cansend multipart templated email messages as well:

$mailer = new Mailer();
$mailer = $mailer
            ->setMailerFormat('both')
            ->setTo('bob@example.com')
            ->setFrom('app@domain.com')
            ->viewBuilder()
                ->setTemplate('welcome', 'fancy');
 
$mailer->deliver();

This would use the following template files:

• templates/email/text/welcome.php
• templates/layout/email/text/fancy.php
• templates/email/html/welcome.php
• templates/layout/email/html/fancy.php

When sending templated emails you have the option of sending eithertext, html or both.

You can set all view related config using the view bulder instance got byMailer::viewBuilder() similar to how you do the same in controller.

You can set view variables with Mailer::setViewVars():

$mailer = new Mailer('templated');
$mailer->setViewVars(['value' => 12345]);

Or you can use the view builder methods ViewBuilder::setVar() andViewBuilder::setVars().

In your email templates you can use these with:

<p>Here is your value: <b><?= $value ?></b></p>

You can use helpers in emails as well, much like you can in normal template files.By default only the HtmlHelper is loaded. You can load additionalhelpers using the ViewBuilder::setHelpers() method:

$mailer->viewBuilder()->setHelpers(['Html', 'Custom', 'Text']);

When setting helpers be sure to include ‘Html’ or it will be removed from thehelpers loaded in your email template.

If you want to send email using templates in a plugin you can use the familiarplugin syntax to do so:

$mailer = new Mailer();
$mailer->viewBuilder()->setTemplate('Blog.new_comment');

The above would use template and layout from the Blog plugin as an example.

In some cases, you might need to override the default template provided by plugins.You can do this using themes:

$mailer->viewBuilder()
    ->setTemplate('Blog.new_comment')
    ->setLayout('Blog.auto_message')
    ->setTheme('TestTheme');

This allows you to override the new_comment template in your theme withoutmodifying the Blog plugin. The template file needs to be created in thefollowing path:templates/plugin/TestTheme/plugin/Blog/email/text/new_comment.php.

Sending Attachments

• Cake\Mailer\Mailer::setAttachments($attachments)

You can attach files to email messages as well. There are a fewdifferent formats depending on what kind of files you have, and howyou want the filenames to appear in the recipient’s mail client:

• String: $mailer->setAttachments('/full/file/path/file.png') will attach thisfile with the name file.png.

• Array: $mailer->setAttachments(['/full/file/path/file.png']) will havethe same behavior as using a string.

• Array with key:$mailer->setAttachments(['photo.png' => '/full/some_hash.png']) willattach some_hash.png with the name photo.png. The recipient will seephoto.png, not some_hash.png.

• Nested arrays:

$mailer->setAttachments([
    'photo.png' => [
        'file' => '/full/some_hash.png',
        'mimetype' => 'image/png',
        'contentId' => 'my-unique-id'
    ]
]);

The above will attach the file with different mimetype and with customContent ID (when set the content ID the attachment is transformed to inline).The mimetype and contentId are optional in this form.

4.1. When you are using the contentId, you can use the file in the HTMLbody like <img src="cid:my-content-id">.

4.2. You can use the contentDisposition option to disable theContent-Disposition header for an attachment. This is useful whensending ical invites to clients using outlook.

4.3 Instead of the file option you can provide the file contents asa string using the data option. This allows you to attach files withoutneeding file paths to them.

Relaxing Address Validation Rules

• Cake\Mailer\Mailer::setEmailPattern($pattern)

If you are having validation issues when sending to non-compliant addresses, youcan relax the pattern used to validate email addresses. This is sometimesnecessary when dealing with some ISP’s:

$mailer = new Mailer('default');
 
// Relax the email pattern, so you can send
// to non-conformant addresses.
$mailer->setEmailPattern($newPattern);

Sending Messages Quickly

Sometimes you need a quick way to fire off an email, and you don’t necessarilywant to setup a bunch of configuration ahead of time.Cake\Mailer\Email::deliver() is intended for that purpose.

You can create your configuration usingCake\Mailer\Email::config(), or use an array with alloptions that you need and use the static method Email::deliver().Example:

Email::deliver('you@example.com', 'Subject', 'Message', ['from' => 'me@example.com']);

This method will send an email to “you@example.com”, from “me@example.com” withsubject “Subject” and content “Message”.

The return of deliver() is a Cake\Mailer\Email instance with allconfigurations set. If you do not want to send the email right away, and wishto configure a few things before sending, you can pass the 5th parameter asfalse.

The 3rd parameter is the content of message or an array with variables (whenusing rendered content).

The 4th parameter can be an array with the configurations or a string with thename of configuration in Configure.

If you want, you can pass the to, subject and message as null and do allconfigurations in the 4th parameter (as array or using Configure).Check the list of configurations to see all accepted configs.

Sending Emails from CLI

When sending emails within a CLI script (Shells, Tasks, …) you should manuallyset the domain name for Mailer to use. It will serve as the host name for themessage id (since there is no host name in a CLI environment):

$mailer->setDomain('www.example.org');
// Results in message ids like ``<UUID@www.example.org>`` (valid)
// Instead of `<UUID@>`` (invalid)

A valid message id can help to prevent emails ending up in spam folders.

Creating Reusable Emails

Until now we have seen how to directly use the the Mailer class to create andsend one emails. But main feature of mailer is to allow creating reusable emailsthroughout your application. They can also be used to contain multiple emailconfigurations in one location. This helps keep your code DRYer and keeps emailconfiguration noise out of other areas in your application.

In this example we will be creating a Mailer that contains user-relatedemails. To create our UserMailer, create the filesrc/Mailer/UserMailer.php. The contents of the file should look like thefollowing:

namespace App\Mailer;
 
use Cake\Mailer\Mailer;
 
class UserMailer extends Mailer
{
    public function welcome($user)
    {
        $this
            ->setTo($user->email)
            ->setSubject(sprintf('Welcome %s', $user->name))
            ->viewBuilder()
                ->setTemplate('welcome_mail'); // By default template with same name as method name is used.
    }
 
    public function resetPassword($user)
    {
        $this
            ->setTo($user->email)
            ->setSubject('Reset password')
            ->setViewVars(['token' => $user->token]);
    }
}

In our example we have created two methods, one for sending a welcome email, andanother for sending a password reset email. Each of these methods expect a userEntity and utilizes its properties for configuring each email.

We are now able to use our UserMailer to send out our user-related emailsfrom anywhere in our application. For example, if we wanted to send our welcomeemail we could do the following:

namespace App\Controller;
 
use Cake\Mailer\MailerAwareTrait;
 
class UsersController extends AppController
{
    use MailerAwareTrait;
 
    public function register()
    {
        $user = $this->Users->newEmptyEntity();
        if ($this->request->is('post')) {
            $user = $this->Users->patchEntity($user, $this->request->getData())
            if ($this->Users->save($user)) {
                $this->getMailer('User')->send('welcome', [$user]);
            }
        }
        $this->set('user', $user);
    }
}

If we wanted to completely separate sending a user their welcome email from ourapplication’s code, we can have our UserMailer subscribe to theModel.afterSave event. By subscribing to an event, we can keep ourapplication’s user-related classes completely free of email-related logic andinstructions. For example, we could add the following to our UserMailer:

public function implementedEvents()
{
    return [
        'Model.afterSave' => 'onRegistration'
    ];
}
 
public function onRegistration(EventInterface $event, EntityInterface $entity, ArrayObject $options)
{
    if ($entity->isNew()) {
        $this->send('welcome', [$entity]);
    }
}

You can now register the mailer as an event listener and theonRegistration() method will be invoked every time the Model.afterSaveevent is fired:

// attach to Users event manager
$this->Users->getEventManager()->on($this->getMailer('User'));

Note

For information on how to register event listener objects,please refer to the Registering Listeners documentation.

Configuring Transports

Email messages are delivered by transports. Different transports allow you tosend messages via PHP’s mail() function, SMTP servers, or not at all whichis useful for debugging. Configuring transports allows you to keep configurationdata out of your application code and makes deployment simpler as you can simplychange the configuration data. An example transport configuration looks like:

use Cake\Mailer\TransportFactory;
 
// Sample Mail configuration
TransportFactory::setConfig('default', [
    'className' => 'Mail'
]);
 
// Sample SMTP configuration.
TransportFactory::setConfig('gmail', [
    'host' => 'ssl://smtp.gmail.com',
    'port' => 465,
    'username' => 'my@gmail.com',
    'password' => 'secret',
    'className' => 'Smtp'
]);

You can configure SSL SMTP servers, like Gmail. To do so, put the ssl://prefix in the host and configure the port value accordingly. You can alsoenable TLS SMTP using the tls option:

use Cake\Mailer\TransportFactory;
 
TransportFactory::setConfig('gmail', [
    'host' => 'smtp.gmail.com',
    'port' => 587,
    'username' => 'my@gmail.com',
    'password' => 'secret',
    'className' => 'Smtp',
    'tls' => true
]);

The above configuration would enable TLS communication for email messages.

To configure your mailer to use a specific transport you can useCake\Mailer\Mailer::setTransport() method or have the transportin your configuration:

// Use a named transport already configured using TransportFactory::setConfig()
$mailer->setTransport('gmail');
 
// Use a constructed object.
$mailer->setTransport(new \Cake\Mailer\Transport\DebugTransport());

Warning

You will need to have access for less secure apps enabled in your Googleaccount for this to work:Allowing less secure apps to access youraccount.

Note

Gmail SMTP settings.

Note

To use SSL + SMTP, you will need to have the SSL configured in your PHPinstall.

Configuration options can also be provided as a DSN string. This isuseful when working with environment variables or PaaS providers:

TransportFactory::setConfig('default', [
    'url' => 'smtp://my@gmail.com:secret@smtp.gmail.com:587?tls=true',
]);

When using a DSN string you can define any additional parameters/options asquery string arguments.

• static Cake\Mailer\Mailer::drop($key)

Once configured, transports cannot be modified. In order to modify a transportyou must first drop it and then reconfigure it.

Creating Custom Transports

You are able to create your custom transports to for e.g. send email using serviceslike SendGrid, MailGun, Postmark etc. To create your transport, first create the filesrc/Mailer/Transport/ExampleTransport.php (where Example is the name of yourtransport). To start off your file should look like:

namespace App\Mailer\Transport;
 
use Cake\Mailer\AbstractTransport;
use Cake\Mailer\Message;
 
class ExampleTransport extends AbstractTransport
{
    public function send(Message $message): array
    {
        // Do something.
    }
}

You must implement the method send(Mailer $mailer) with your custom logic.

Sending emails without using Mailer

The Mailer is a higer level abstraction class which acts as a bridge betweenthe Cake\Mailer\Message, Cake\Mailer\Renderer and Cake\Mailer\AbstractTransportclasses to make email configuration and delivery easy.

If you want you can use these classes directly with the Mailer too.

For e.g.:

$render = new \Cake\Mailer\Renderer();
$render->viewBuilder()
    ->setTemplate('custom')
    ->setLayout('sparkly');
 
$message = new \Cake\Mailer\Message();
$message
    ->setForm('admin@cakephp.org')
    ->setTo('user@foo.com')
    ->setBody($render->render());
 
$transport = new \Cake\Mailer\Transport\MailTransport();
$result = $transport->send($message);

You can even skip using the Renderer and set the message body directlyusing Message::setBodyText() and Message::setBodyHtml() methods.

Testing Mailer

To test email, add Cake\TestSuite\EmailTrait to your test case.The MailerTrait provides your test case with a collection of assertionsthat you can perform on any emails sent by the application.

Adding the EmailTrait to your test case will replace all of your application’semail transports with the Cake\TestSuite\TestMailerTransport. This transportintercepts emails instead of sending them, and allows you to assert against them.

Add the trait to your test case to start testing emails:

namespace App\Test\TestCase;
 
use Cake\TestSuite\EmailTrait;
 
class MyTestCase extends TestCase
{
    use EmailTrait;
}

Assertion methods

The Cake\TestSuite\EmailTrait trait provides the following assertions:

// Asserts an expected number of emails were sent
$this->assertMailCount($count);
 
// Asserts that no emails were sent
$this->assertNoMailSent();
 
// Asserts an email was sent to an address
$this->assertMailSentTo($address);
 
// Asserts an email was sent from an address
$this->assertMailSentFrom($address);
 
// Asserts an email contains expected contents
$this->assertMailContains($contents);
 
// Asserts an email contains expected html contents
$this->assertMailContainsHtml($contents);
 
// Asserts an email contains expected text contents
$this->assertMailContainsText($contents);
 
// Asserts an email contains the expected value within an Message getter (e.g., "subject")
$this->assertMailSentWith($expected, $parameter);
 
// Asserts an email at a specific index was sent to an address
$this->assertMailSentToAt($at, $address);
 
// Asserts an email at a specific index was sent from an address
$this->assertMailSentFromAt($at, $address);
 
// Asserts an email at a specific index contains expected contents
$this->assertMailContainsAt($at, $contents);
 
// Asserts an email at a specific index contains expected html contents
$this->assertMailContainsHtmlAt($at, $contents);
 
// Asserts an email at a specific index contains expected text contents
$this->assertMailContainsTextAt($at, $contents);
 
// Asserts an email contains an attachment
$this->assertMailContainsAttachment('test.png');
 
// Asserts an email at a specific index contains the expected value within an Message getter (e.g., "subject")
$this->assertMailSentWithAt($at, $expected, $parameter);