How to close Smtp connection in SwiftMailer

Question

I use SwiftMailer to send emails from a gearman worker process. I'm using the Swift_SmtpTransport class to send emails.

The problem is that if this worker process stays idle for sometime, the SwiftMailer smtp connection times out. Now when the next job arrives, SwiftMailer fails to send emails as the connection has been timed out.

Ideally, I would want to close the smtp connection after every job. I'm unable to locate a api in the class which does this specifically. Neither does unset() object works since this is a static class.

Answer 1

I send mails in a loop and I was catching the Swift_TransportException and creating a new instance of Swift_Mailer but it wasn't the right fix: the problem is the transport, not the mailer. The solution is to issue an explicit call to Swift_SmtpTransport::stop():

foreach($recipients as $to => $body){
    try{
        $message->setTo($to);
        $message->setBody(body);
        $mailer->send($message);
    }catch(Swift_TransportException $e){
        $mailer->getTransport()->stop();
        sleep(10); // Just in case ;-)
    }
}

This way, Swift detects the mailer is stopped and starts it automatically, so it recovers correctly from communication errors.