[arasx]

There are hundreds of ready made libraries which help you easily talk to SMTP without invoking a shell cmd. You also have the option to use sock functions (fsockopen) and write your connection wrapper. These are not windows-only features.

[throwanem]

Of course. The part I still can't get my head around is where the language feature that'd relieve me of the need to vet a library, or worse write socket code by hand like some kind of barbarian, isn't compiled in for non-Windows platforms, because reasons.

[Piskvorrr]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ PHP. This is one of the insane decisions made in PHP4 that stays there because it's always been there.