History of Swift Mailer

Swift Mailer began back in 2005 as a one-class project for sending mail over SMTP. It has since grown into the flexible component-based library that is in development today.

I first posted Swift Mailer on a web forum at http://forums.devnetwork.net asking for comments from other developers. It was never intended as a fully supported open source project, but members of the forum began to adopt it and make use of it.

Very quickly feature requests were coming to me for the ability to add attachments and use SMTP authentication, along with a number of other "obvious" missing features. Considering the only alternative was PHPMailer it seemed like a good time to bring some fresh tools to the table. I began working towards a more component based, PHP5-like approach unlike the existing single-class, legacy PHP4 approach taken by PHPMailer.

Members of the forum offered a lot of advice and critique on my code as I worked through this project and released versions 2 and 3 of the library in 2005 and 2006, which by then had been broken down into smaller classes offering more flexibility and supporting plugins. To this day I still receive a lot of feature requests from users both on the forum and in my inbox.

I have learned a lot over the years whilst working on Swift Mailer and I believe that I have matured a lot as a developer, improving the underlying code in the library as I have done so.

Until 2008 I was the sole developer of Swift Mailer, but entering 2009 I gained the support of two experienced developers well-known to me: Paul Annesley and Christopher Thompson. This has been an extremely welcome change.

Now 2009 and in its fourth major version Swift Mailer is more object-oriented and flexible than ever, both from a usability standpoint and from a development standpoint.

By no means is Swift Mailer ready to call "finished". There are still many features that can be added to the library along with the constant refactoring that happens behind the scenes.