PHPMailer VS Mautic

In any case, I don't recommend using mail() anyway. It's a low level function, a PITA to work with and you need to understand some infrastructure stuff to make it reliable. A simple alternative is https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer.

Refer to PHPMailer documentation on Github for detailed installation instructions.

Find an email library for the language you are using. For PHP I used this. Check the examples directory and make them work. If you are using another language, you'll definitely find an email library.

I do it with PHP using PHPMailer. I create my own templates with all the fill-in-the-blanks parts.

As an alternative to using mail() function and SMTP extensions, you can also utilize a very popular PHPMailer. We’ve recently covered it in detail on our blog, check out our guide here.

PHPMailer is the classic email sending library for PHP. It supports several ways of sending email messages such as mail(), Sendmail, qmail, and direct dispatch to SMTP servers. In addition, it provides a list of advanced features:

That is utterly simple, and can be readily converted for usage with cURL through PHP without loading any external libraries. No symfony/mailer. No PHPMailer/PHPMailer. Nothing.

You would then need to setup a function to loop over to use json objects and “email them” you could actually use the same inbox(email address) you are storing the data in to send the data to that mailbox. Using SMTP you could use a lib like https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer to accomplish that piece.

Frankly, it is better to give up upon sending mails from your own server altogether. Instad of plain mail() just go for PHPMailer or similar and send mails via external, well established provider.

Use PHPMailer with SMTP. Saves you a lot of trouble with mails getting caught in spam with using mail()

mautic

There is Mautic which is essentially a Mailchimp alternative.

https://github.com/mautic/mautic is one open source entry. It's pretty robust (full disclosure, I haven't used it in 3+ years). It's a php app that runs independently of your application and has an embeddable js that makes the connection (a lot like google analytics, etc).

So far I found Chatwoot, CiviCRM, Corteza, ERPNext, EspoCRM, Dolibarr, Odoo, OroCRM, Mautic, SuiteCRM and X2CRM and there are probably even much more available. It seems that Odoo and ERPNext are huge but also very flexible (with many extensions available).

Mautic - Email marketing automation

Mautic I started off with Mautic by installing virtual machines from Bitnami. Then the problems start one by one. You need to clear its cache before using its API, not mentioned in the documentation, found this in the support community Process to backup/restore the entire setup is not mentioned properly anywhere which I think is a major red flag for me Pros: has a really nice email templating system inbuilt Cons: PHP, since I dont know php, my app is in node.js and I cannot sit and debug php errors which I encountered many times when trying to work with mautic

// Removed temporarily for https://github.com/mautic/mautic/pull/9602, can be re-added in Mautic 4+ // $bundles[] = new Fidry\PsyshBundle\PsyshBundle();