Joomla User Manual

Introduction¶

Mail Templates are used to send system email messages in plain text or HTML or both, selected in the Mail Templates: Options form. If only one method is selected the alternative will not be present in the message edit form.

The following screenshot shows a selection of the 26 standard Mail Templates available. The list is available by selecting System -> Mail Templates from the Administrator menu,

The mail messages can be customised to alter layout, appearance and wording to suit your site’s needs. For example, you might like to use a site logo and colour scheme in those emails sent to customers. Customisation of emails sent to administrators is less important.

There are two customisation methods: via the Mail Template: Options for all mail templates and via Per Template Mail Settings.

Mail Template: Options¶

Select the Options button in the Mail Templates list Toolbar to gain access to the overall mail template settings. Select the Toggle Inline Help button to see if any of the form fields have extra help.

Mail Format¶

Be aware that a recipient may set a mail client to use simple HTML or Plain Text to avoid download of images. So it may be best to set the Mail Format to Plaintext or Both.

Per Template Mail Settings¶

If this is set to Yes then individual mail template edit forms have an extra Options tab that let you change mail settings for that template and optionally allow you to send a copy (BCC) to a specific email address provided that the Send Copy field here is also set to Enabled.

Template Edit Form¶

In the list of Mail Templates you can select any template to edit. The Title link leads to the edit form for the default English template. Each flag is a link to the same template in that language.

The Mail tab¶

The contents of the Subject and Body areas are stored in language strings initially. This makes it easy to Reset To Default Subject or Body. However, once a specific mail template has been edited its Subject and Body fields are stored in the #__mail_templates table.

The items in curly braces are placeholder tags that are replaced by real values when the email is sent. In the example above {SITENAME} would be whatever name you chose for your site. {Method} would be the selected mail transport method: PHP Mail, Sendmail or SMTP.

The placeholder tags available vary from mail to mail. You could add your own custom placeholder tags but that requires a custom plugin, described in a Magazine article from February 2025.

The Options tab¶

This tab is only present if the Per Template Mail Settings is set to Yes in Mail Templates: Options. The illustration below shows a screenshot with Mail Settings set to No. If set to Yes more form fields appear that override the Mail options set in the Global Configuration, Server tab.

If you want to send a blind carbon copy of an outgoing email to a specific email address you can enter it in the Send Copy To Email field.

Mail Template Overrides¶

To create a mail template override within a custom template:

1. Go to System -> Site Templates -> Open your template (e.g., Cassiopeia).
2. In the Create Overrides tab, select joomla -> mail.
3. Joomla will copy the mailtemplate.php file to your template's /html/layouts/joomla/mail/ directory, where you can modify it as needed.

Once the override is created, you can adjust the layout and styles of your emails without affecting the base template.

List of Mail Templates¶