Send copy of order confirmation email, based on customer data, to different email addresses

Question

Based on certain customer data I need to send a copy of the confirmation email to other email addresses.

I created an observer to catch the order data

checkout_onepage_controller_success_action

In my observer class I load all data I need with

Mage::getModel('sales/order')->load($observer->getOrderIds());

That works like a charm.

Now some code is selecting the email address where the copy supposed to go to.

But how can I send a copy of the order confirmation email to (always different) email addresses?

$order->sendNewOrderEmail();

Above doesn’t work for me because I need the recipient as a parameter.

Any help will be much appreciated. Thank you.

Answer 1

Oh that is a tough one. From what I can see you have two options.

1. Create your own version of the sendNewOrderEmail function so that you do the same stuff and generate the email but just send it to a different address.
2. Work with the $copyTo = $this->_getEmails(self::XML_PATH_UPDATE_EMAIL_COPY_TO);, I know you already have your event and I am not 100% sure what you need but you could change this function,

It might not be ideal but if you rewrite the Mage_Sales_Model_Order you could then check in the _getEmails if your conditions meet then you send a copy to where ever you need to, otherwise you continue with the normal sales order. Even as I write this I am not convinced if this is such a good idea, but I cannot see another "easy" way to hock into this without duplicating a lot of code when generating the email.

One final not is that the event you have selected checkout_onepage_controller_success_action is specific to the onepage checkout so if you create an order via the admin or multiple shipping checkout then your code would not be hit, sadly this has caught me out before :(