Swift is a fully OOP library for sending e-mails from PHP websites and applications. It does not rely on PHP's native mail() function which is known for using high server resources when sending multiple emails. Instead, Swift communicates directly with an SMTP server or a MTA binary to send mail quickly and efficiently.
Early versions of Swift were comparable to PHPMailer. Swift has since evolved and matured into a fully-fledged object-oriented mailing solution. Compared with PHPMailer, the interface for Swift is both tighter and more intuitive. I genuinely belive that no other mailer comes close to Swift in terms of available features.
Swift supports event-driven plugins which offer you the opportunity to really take control of the library and set this mailer apart from everything else that's out there. Over time, and from previous versions, the library has been steadily refactored and is now usable for more than just the blind sending of emails. It can compose RFC 2822 compliant messages for use elsewhere too. I'm looking at offering the reverse and parsing real emails into the message object format used in the library.
If you arrived at this page by searching for PHP e-mail class or something similar then great (that's why I added this paragraph!)... But, Swift is not just an e-mail class. It's a complete mailing library which includes many separate PHP classes which tie together. This offers a tremendous amount of flexibility.
I started developing Swift because I moderate a popular PHP forum and it's clear from some of the posts we see that PHP's native mail() function just doesn't cut the mustard among developers unless you know a lot about how to build emails and you only need to send one message. The only other popular alternative was PHPMailer which is no longer in active development, limited in support, lacking in modern features such as TLS and difficult to interface with. So I wrote Swift initially for the communtity at the PHP Developer's Network Forums and subsequently released it under the LGPL. Enjoy!
No, it's not just a play on the number three! 3.3.3 will be the final release in the version 3 branch of Swift Mailer. It's going to be a short-lived release since version 4 is just about complete. There are a few finishing touches to be made along with a stack of end-user documentation to write but you can expect to see a beta release of 4.0.0 very soon!
Version 3.3.3 is also the final release which will be made for PHP 4 since I took the "Go PHP 5" pledge. That means much more quality OO code in version 4, much faster iterations in development (since I'm not going to have to stumble over PHP 4's downfalls all the time) and of course, more of those features some of you have asked for! If your host isn't running PHP 5 yet, put pressure on them to upgrade. Zend dropped support for PHP 4 in December 2007 and many PHP projects have already made the move to PHP 5.
Enjoy the final v3 release, I'll be back soon with something new and shiny! :)
