my experience… … from PHP to NODE… and back to PHP… if you don’t need REALTIME data… with Sockets… then just stick to good old faithful php…
Node is great… dont get me wrong… i could see the benefits of templating and so on… but i was limited regarding servers (in my case) … and and… and costs … ect ect and limited to cloud hosting with data centers with hudge latency issues… 
But everything you can do with node you can do with php … but not sockets realtime data…
What I did on cloud hosting (node) for your mailer issues… just use an external SMTP host for handling the mail… eg sendgrid or something…