Send Emails from Joomla Extensions in Easy Steps

Joomla content management system allows users to send emails from Joomla extensions. You can take advantage of this feature and send emails to anyone you wish, right from the Joomla extensions. This blog post will help you how to send emails from Joomla extensions in easy steps.

Key components of an email include the sender, recipient, and the message body. To send emails from Joomla extensions, you need to follow the below steps:

1. 1. Set Email Sender in Joomla Use the setSender function in Joomla CMS to set the sender’s email address and name. The email address and name are fetched from the global configuration using an array.
   2. Set Email Recipient in Joomla Use the addRecipient function in Joomla CMS to add the email address of the intended recipient. The email address of the logged-in user is fetched from the user object.
   3. Create the Mail Body You can create the email body in plain text format or HTML format. Use the setBody function to compose the email message. If you use HTML format, remember to set the IsHTML function to “true” and include the appropriate encoding.
   4. Send Your Mail From Extensions To send the email, use the Send function in Joomla CMS. This function returns “True” on success, or a JError object if an error occurs. You can customize and write your error handler to handle any errors that may occur.

Set Email Sender in Joomla

• In Joomla CMS, the setSender function is used to send emails.
• It takes an array with an email address and a name as argument.
• The email addresses and names are fetched from the global configuration.

$config =JFactory::getConfig();
$sender = array(
$config->getValue( 'config.mailfrom' ),
$config->getValue( 'config.fromname' ) );
$mailer->setSender($sender);

Set Email Recipient in Joomla

• In Joomla CMS, the addRecipient function is used to receive the emails.
• The email address of the logged in user is fetched from the user object.
• An array of email addresses is used when there are multiple recipients.

$user = JFactory::getUser();
$recipient = $user->email;
$mailer->addRecipient($recipient);

Create the Mail Body

• Use setBody to compose the mail and add your message.
• 2 ways to create mail body – plain text format or HTML format.
• Use setSubject function for plain text or IsHTML for HTML format.

1. Plain Text Mail

$body   = "Your body stringnin double quotes if you want to parse the nnewlines etc";
$mailer->setSubject('Your subject string');
$mailer->setBody($body);
// Optional file attached
$mailer->addAttachment(JPATH_COMPONENT.DS.'assets'.DS.'document.pdf');

2. HTML Format Mail

$body   = '<h2>Our mail</h2>'
. '<div>A message to our dear readers'
. '<img src="cid:logo_id" alt="logo"/></div>';
$mailer->isHTML(true);
$mailer->Encoding = 'base64';
$mailer->setBody($body);
// Optionally add embedded image
$mailer->AddEmbeddedImage( JPATH_COMPONENT.DS.'assets'.DS.'logo128.jpg', 'logo_id', 'logo.jpg', 'base64', 'image/jpeg' );

Send Mail from Joomla Extensions

• In Joomla CMS, the Send function is used to receive the emails.
• It returns True on success else returns a JError object.
• You can even customize and write your own error handler.

$send = $mailer->Send();
if ( $send !== true ) {
echo 'Error sending email: ' . $send->message;
} else {
echo 'Mail sent';
}