String compare on a bool

Question

I'm pretty sure this is a simple fundamental flaw in my newb PHP knowledge, but I was surprised when the following happened:

$result is TRUE... so why is it considered equal to the string "email"? I'm guessing this is because, technically, it's a bool and it isn't false? So when it's compared against a string (e.g. "email") it returns true.

Should I change my method to return as the result as a string containing "true" (instead of return true; on success), or is there another way I should be doing this?

Thanks.