This chapter has brought you up to speed on the e-mail and news systems. We introduced you to the basics of the Internet e-mail system and Usenet, as well as the common languages, or protocols, servers, and clients use to talk to each other: SMTP and NNTP.
We've also learned how to send both regular and sophisticated MIME e-mail with PHP. The built in mail() function lies at the heart of PHP's e-mail capability: In case you don't have a local mail system the mail() function relies on, we also showed you how to send e-mail using a remote SMTP server.
In addition, we learned how to post news articles to one or more newsgroups of your choice using a remote NNTP server.
We desgined and created a number of classes demonstrating what we've learned in this chapter:
My_Mail: a basic class used to send regular e-mail messages
My_Mime_Mail: a more sophisticated e-mail class that extends My_Mail to handle MIME features
My_Smtp_Mail: a basic e-mail class using a remote SMTP server
My_Smtp_Mime_Mail: an SMTP e-mail class that can handle MIME
My_Nntp: a basic NNTP class that enables the user to post news articles
Finally, we built a web-based e-mailer class that can send e-mail or post news articles. These classes we created in this chapter will be used as a foundation on which to build a more sophisticated e-mail and news application in the next chapter where we deal with PHP's IMAP functions.