[FLOW3-general] Sending Mails with Fluid - where is the proper place in the application architecture?

[Erik Frister]

Hi guys,

I have a question regarding sending mails:

I have developed a very basic way to send an email to an administrator 
when a user submits a contact form. Please see 
https://gist.github.com/1627122 for the roughly 30 lines of code I used.

I basically searched my way around the code to come up with the 
solution. Basically, this script renders two mails, HTML and Plaintext, 
located in Resources/Private/Templates/@Controller/Mails/@Action. at Format.

I have two questions:

1. Is this a legitimate way of creating and rendering the Fluid view? Or 
is there a more simple way? I tried using $this->view->renderPartial() 
without success.

2. What bothers me most is that the mail-sending logic is inside the 
controller action. Looking inside the Blog example, you guys send a mail 
(without Fluid) using a signal and a slot. However, in order to use 
Fluid (at least in my implementation) I need the controllerContext and 
some protected methods of the Controller, which will not be accessible 
inside the Slot. Given that I will be sending a lot more emails (e.g. 
DOI, private messages etc) can you guys give me your thoughts as to what 
the architectually most elegant way of a mail sending implementation 
would be?

Thanks,
Erik