Join efforts on Symfony Mailer and deprecate PHPMailer SMTP?

Thanks for your interest @Anybody. There are a few differences between the modules and their goals.

PHPMailer SMTP

• Integrates the PHPMailer library with Drupal's mail system for sending email via SMTP
• Is lean, just doing what it needs to and leveraging the PHPMailer library as much as possible
• Works now, with every module which sends email
• Will only ever send email via SMTP, nothing else

Drupal Symfony Mailer

• Integrates the Symfony Mailer package with Drupal
• Can send email over a number of different transport protocols
• Replaces Drupal's current mail system
• Module specific code is required to support sending modules (newsletters, webform etc.)
• Because of the above, it is quite a bulky module
• Possibly the future of Drupal's email subsystem

I don't see this module and Symfony Mailer as competitors, they can both send email but beyond that they are quite different. I still see a need to have a simple, robust solution for sending email via SMTP right now.

The plan is to maintain this module for as long as it's required. I doubt there will be any more features added so as times change people will migrate to whatever is the best solution for them.

Email services (Sendgrid, Mailgun etc.) are recommending the use of their REST APIs to send email, as are some hosting platforms. There are specific modules now for both of those services and others. I see Symfony Mailer can send email using a number of third party libraries, so this is probably where things are heading.

In short, maintaining this module doesn't take up a lot of time and at the moment it's very useful for some people's needs.

Will only ever send email via SMTP, nothing else

And format HTML email with support for attachments.

Thank you very very much for the detailed reply and clarification, @imclean. It's so useful that you could discuss to put the comparison onto the module page or into the README perhaps?

So I'll close this won't fix due to the given clear reasons! :) Thanks!

The project page is long enough as it is and I'm not keen on confusing things by adding a comparison with one specific module which isn't quite ready for prime time. People are already installing multiple/duplicate email modules simply because they see them mentioned somewhere. I'll add a link to this discussion, however.

As I mentioned in #2, many email services are recommending the use of their APIs instead of SMTP for sending email. The Pantheon hosting platform also recommends this approach.

There are a few modules for specific services. This is an incomplete list, but it gives you an idea of what's out there.

• Sendgrid →
• Mailgun →
• Mailchimp Transactional →
• Gmail API →
• Microsoft Graph API Mail system → (dev release only)

Then there's Drupal Symfony Mailer → , which replaces the current mail system. Check the issue queue → for compatibility with other modules.

It can use other transports via third party providers: https://symfony.com/doc/current/mailer.html#using-a-3rd-party-transport