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Italix Mail

Transactional mail that cannot fail silently.

Zero Composer dependencies; ext-mbstring for header encoding, ext-openssl for TLS, ext-pdo for the shipped log.

The rule

The log row is written before the transport is touched. Everything else here follows from it.

The history: in one application every mailer caught its own SMTP failure and reported it with error_log() — which on that server wrote nowhere, because php-fpm had no error_log for the pool and catch_workers_output was off. The interface said "sent" either way. For months nobody could answer whether a single message had left the building.

Logging after a successful send has the same defect in a smaller form: a process killed mid-send leaves nothing at all. So:

A row still queued an hour later means a process died between writing it and hearing back. That is the most informative thing in the table, and ix mail:status --stranded asks for exactly it.

Sending

send() never throws for a delivery problem. It returns a Result. A mailer that throws is a mailer whose callers write try { } catch { }, and that catch block is where the silent failures lived. A message that cannot be built — no recipient, a newline in a subject — does throw MailException, because that is a bug in the caller and burying it among real failures helps nobody.

context() is the field the log is worth having for. "Delivery failed" tells you nothing at 9am; "invoice 4471, party 147" tells you which customer to call.

Permanent versus temporary

is_retryable() answers whether trying again could work:

A queue that retries a wrong password turns one misconfiguration into a thousand log lines.

Bodies

view() renders through whatever BodyRenderer the mailer was given. In an Italix application that is a two-line adapter over ViewRenderer, so mail templates get the same escaping guarantee, the same partials and the same theme fallback as every page:

A plain-text alternative is generated from the HTML rather than required. Asking every caller to write the body twice guarantees the second one rots, and an HTML-only message scores worse with every spam filter there is. Link targets survive the conversion in parentheses — a text-only reader receiving "click here" with no URL has received nothing.

Transports

SmtpTransport ships in core: EHLO, STARTTLS or implicit TLS, AUTH LOGIN, and SMTP reply codes mapped to machine error codes. About 200 lines, which is why PHPMailer is not a framework dependency — an application that needs attachments or DKIM writes a Transport over it and loses nothing else.

NullTransport accepts everything, sends nothing, and remembers all of it. For tests, and for a development environment where mail must not escape — it still goes through Mailer, so the log row is written exactly as in production.

Credentials never reach the transcript: the two lines after AUTH LOGIN are masked.

Three details that are invisible when wrong

Header injection is refused, not escaped. A name containing CRLF produces a perfectly deliverable message with an extra Bcc nobody asked for, and no encoding makes that one header again — the same position Html::attribs() takes on attribute names. Control characters are checked before trim(), which would otherwise strip them and silently rewrite the caller's data.

Bcc is in the envelope and not in the headers. Writing it into a header is how blind copies stop being blind.

A lone . line is dot-stuffed by the transport. In SMTP's DATA phase a bare dot ends the message; unescaped it truncates the mail for the one customer whose text contains one. It happens in the transport rather than at build time, so the logged message is what was actually written.

From the CLI

Exits 1 when anything failed or is stranded, so a monitor can watch it.

Deliberately not

• No mailable hierarchy, no markdown mail, no attachments.
• No queue coupling — asynchronous sending is $queue->push(new SendMail(...)), a composition rather than a feature.
• No DKIM, no pooling, no pipelining. That is the difference between 200 lines and 2,000.