PHPMailer Questions

[doni49]

I just downloaded PHPMailer.

1)  I'm looking throught the docs and not sure what route to take.  I'm on a hosted linux server with PHP5.  In the past, whenever I've sent any email using PHP, I did so with mail().  But CPanel tells me a "path to sendmail".  So I'm pretty sure I can also use sendmail.  I also have access to three smtp servers.

Can someone help me figure out the pros and cons of one vs the others?

Also, assuming for a minute that I DON'T use SMTP, do I need to upload class.smtp.php to the server?

2) The docs tell me that I can set the encoding to one of 5 values.  I'm not sure what the different ones mean.

I'm interested in being able to send messages that have HTML (but also have plaintext for email clients that can't--or are set not to--display HTML), be able to send file attachments sometimes.

The options for this are "8bit", "7bit", "binary", "base64", and "quoted-printable".

3) What's the difference between "Sender" and "From"?