[development] HTML emails

Wed Jul 16 09:12:33 UTC 2008

I haven't looked at drupal 7 yet, so I'm throwing this out there for  
discussion.

The D6 mail api seems like it's pretty much designed for plain text  
emails, however, a module's implementation of hook_mail can clearly  
set the headers of the mail to "Content-Type: text/html;  
charset=utf-8" and send rich text.

For example, I'm looking at using "forward" module for the "email this  
page" link on a node, and the "simplenews" module, which uses  
"mimemail" to send rich emails, including attachments. Both "forward"  
and "mimemail" modules create a html header.

The problem occurs when a module implements "drupal_mail_wrapper()" to  
build a html header when hook_mail has already done that - you can  
easily end up with bodies like:

<!doctype... <-- from drupal_mail_wrapper()
<html>
<head>...</head>
<body><div....
<!doctype. <-- from hook_mail()
<html>
<head> ... etc.

Because there are two opportunities to create the html "head" for the  
message: in hook_mail and drupal_mail_wrapper.

I'm throwing this out there for discussion, I think that the hook_mail  
should construct the message in a similar fashion to the Form API,  
specifying a theme for rendering the body part of the message (ie what  
goes in the <body> tag) and anything special that needs to go in the  
head as attributes.

That way the message can be constructed only once.

Besides, email clients have been HTML friendly for a *long* time, so I  
don't see why Drupal shouldn't have an interface that understands rich  
email messages.

Thoughts?

Matt

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