Tonight was the first time that I needed to write some code for a business that would send email to customers, or at least email that needed to be reliable and feature rich. I looked at the documentation for the PHP mail function and after a lot of reading realized it was not going to work. If I wanted to use HTML, that involved a lot of uncertainty, if I wanted to use UTF-8, that involved a lot of uncertainty. There were a lot of unknowns but one thing that was quickly becoming a known was that I was not going to fix this problem.

I knew I could send simple text emails with a URL to details if I had to, but before I did that, I wondered if someone else had solved my problem since what I wanted was reasonable and obvious. To my great surprise a few people had. It came down to two tools, Swift Mailer and PHP Mailer.

After doing some Google searches and research, it became clear that Swift Mailer was probably going to be better for me. And the reasons why are big lessons for PHP Mailer. Swift Mailer had a nice simple website, they had one product, and they had a download link on the front page. Right off the bat, it was looking simple. On the other hand PHP Mailer has four products which I would have to investigate to find out which one was right for me. Their home page is a mess that for some reason seems to focus on ads for other people’s products along with tons of text about who knows what. It would take me hours just to parse the homepage.

But, what took it over the edge was that Swift Mailer has a beautiful object oriented design to their API and they talk about that being a goal, they have full easy to understand documentation, installation is a breeze, as it should be, all while offering an incredibly feature rich product. Swift Mailer wins by a mile.

Was it as easy as it looked? Well, in about an hour I had built a WordPress plugin that would include Swift Mailer’s functionality in my blog on demand. I had added code to another plugin to enable Swift Mailer at the right time and send an email from one Gmail account to another using Gmail’s smtp server with a secure connection over SSL.

One hour.

I literally copied the code over and changed the important bits. I had one issue where Gmail didn’t like the port the Swift Mailer docs used for SSL, but the Gmail docs listed the alternative port and things worked perfectly.

Furthermore, there are tons of features of Swift Mailer that will actually inspire me to do more with email.

Kudos to the Swift Mailer team, you’ve really created a great product and you are a poster project for open source. Thank you!

I’m a big fan of Google hosted email. You get that great Gmail experience, but with your own domain. It also incorporates Google Docs and Calendar right into the mix so companies can easily share documents and meetings. This is great.

But what happens if your company wants to use AdSense? Well, you have to “sign up” for a Google Account using your email. Then it will create an account for you. But wait, didn’t you already have an account? Yes. So now you have two accounts with the same email, and they are both google accounts, but they are not the same. The AdSense account will also hook you up with Google Docs, but its a whole different Docs than the other account. Confusing, huh?

Now add Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Google Voice, and Google Reader. They can only use one of the accounts as well.

Furthermore, lets say you had a thriving business and were actually making good money by participating in AdSense? Let’s say this account was under some Gmail address. Well, now you have this wonderful domain address, and you don’t really need that Gmail address. You want to transfer everything over. Well, too bad. You can’t. You just can’t. It’s not like you have to know the right people or something. Google just gets fixated on the email associated with these services and has no concept of ever changing that. They actually “recommend” you shut down the old AdSense account completely and start a new one. Oh, and by the way, the policy clearly states that you can’t have two AdSense accounts at the same time, so that should be a fun (and expensive) transition for you if you choose to make it.

This might seem odd to you. You might even try to search (using Google) for an explanation. But there isn’t one. Google is bizarrely silent on the issue. Well, you can imagine that one day they will have it sorted out, but for now, it’s just a big, and often expensive, mystery.

Update: I recently found that Google will allow you to change your email address as long as it is not an @gmail.com address. So the moral of the story is never ever sign up for AdSense with an @gmail.com address.