Proper Mail Support

Email is rather a unique case. The current class is a direct port from CI3, barely updated to work with PHP7/8, and wrapped as a service. There aren’t any other components left so untouched, and the result is as OP noted: ugly.
Mailer is underway and scheduled to be included with our next release, 4.2. You can view its current state at the “refactor/email” branch. This endeavor was started by Jim, who didn’t get very far but left some ambitious interfaces. I took it over and wrote the majority of the code, using some other packages as references but Symfony’s Mailer was definitely one of the big inspirations.
I have no particular email experience; plodding through various protocol handshakes and handling encodings has been hair-pulling at times. We will need experience from the community to step up and contribute in order for this thing to be a success.