From Müller to Höffer

PHP Mail Function: UTF-8 E-Mail Headers

With the function mail() it is possible to send mails quickly and easily using PHP. If your e-mail text is UTF-8 encoded, it is sufficient to add the following line to the header of the e-mail so that the mail application of the recipient can display the message correctly:

Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

However, the «Content-Type» specified in the header only refers to the text of the mail. In cases we would also like to work with UTF-8 within the header information, we have to proceed in a different way.

If the header contains 8 bit characters outside the ASCII range, it can quickly lead to problems, because there are enough servers and applications out there that cannot handle those characters correctly. In other words, you can use digits or letters from A to Z without any problems, but as soon as we are using some accents, umlauts or characters from other languages (e.g. Cyrillic or Chinese characters), incorrect representations are occurring because those character code points are located outside the ASCII range.

Often, it happens that a mail function is working perfectly on the first sight, but this is only because we have only used ASCII characters in the subject and the names of sender and recipient before. As soon as the first Müller should receive an e-mail, the system breaks.

UTF-8 Encoding in the Header

To be able to nevertheless use UTF-8 characters in the header, we have to encode the relevant string in a way, that it only contains 7 bit characters which are understandable for all involved programs.

For this purpose, the PHP function base64_encode() is suitable, which can encode the passed string with base64. This is a method that was developed to transfer binary data through systems that are not able to work with 8 bit characters.

$subject = 'Subject containg Ä, Ö, Á'; $subject = '=?UTF-8?B?'.base64_encode($subject).'?=';

As an example, we would like to send an e-mail with a subject containing some umlauts and accents. For this, we are passing the subject string to the base64_encode function and we are building our subject out of it.

It is important, that we surround the result of the function with the string «=?UTF-8?B?» and «? brush: php»>// encode sender, recipient and subject $s = ‘=?UTF-8?B?’.base64_encode(‘Anna Müller’).’?=’; $r = ‘=?UTF-8?B?’.base64_encode(‘Ben Höffer’).’?=’; $subject = ‘=?UTF-8?B?’.base64_encode(‘From Müller to Höffer’).’?=’; // append e-mail addresses $s .= ‘ ‘; $r .= ‘ ‘; // create header $header = ‘MIME-Version: 1.0’ . «\r\n»; $header .= ‘Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8’ . «\r\n»; $header .= ‘To: ‘ . $r. «\r\n»; $header .= ‘From: ‘ . $s. «\r\n»; // write HTML message $msg = ‘‘; $msg .= ‘

Message

‘; // send mail mail($r, $subject, $msg, $header);

We are sending and UTF8-HTML e-mail here. So that it is possible to display the text of the mail correctly, we have defined «charset=UTF-8» in the header Content-Type section. Additionally, we are encoding sender and recipient with using the method introduced about. More information about sending e-mails in PHP, you can get here.

About the Author

You can find Software by Stefan Trost on sttmedia.com. Do you need an individual software solution according to your needs? — sttmedia.com/contact
Show Profile

Related Topics

PHP: Sending an E-Mail

PHP: Add target=»_blank» to (outgoing) HTML Links

HTML: Eliminate problems with special characters and character encodings

Lord’s Prayer in 20 other Languages

How to avoid Spam Mails

jQuery: Toggle Checkboxes (Select/Unselect All)

How to resize Image before Upload in Browser

Important Note

Please note: The contributions published on askingbox.com are contributions of users and should not substitute professional advice. They are not verified by independents and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of askingbox.com. Learn more.

Participate

Ask your own question or write your own article on askingbox.com. That’s how it’s done.

Источник

mail

Each line should be separated with a CRLF (\r\n). Lines should not be larger than 70 characters.

(Windows only) When PHP is talking to a SMTP server directly, if a full stop is found on the start of a line, it is removed. To counter-act this, replace these occurrences with a double dot.

String or array to be inserted at the end of the email header.

This is typically used to add extra headers (From, Cc, and Bcc). Multiple extra headers should be separated with a CRLF (\r\n). If outside data are used to compose this header, the data should be sanitized so that no unwanted headers could be injected.

If an array is passed, its keys are the header names and its values are the respective header values.

Note:

Before PHP 5.4.42 and 5.5.27, repectively, additional_headers did not have mail header injection protection. Therefore, users must make sure specified headers are safe and contains headers only. i.e. Never start mail body by putting multiple newlines.

Note:

When sending mail, the mail must contain a From header. This can be set with the additional_headers parameter, or a default can be set in php.ini .

Failing to do this will result in an error message similar to Warning: mail(): «sendmail_from» not set in php.ini or custom «From:» header missing . The From header sets also Return-Path when sending directly via SMTP (Windows only).

Note:

If messages are not received, try using a LF (\n) only. Some Unix mail transfer agents (most notably » qmail) replace LF by CRLF automatically (which leads to doubling CR if CRLF is used). This should be a last resort, as it does not comply with » RFC 2822.

The additional_params parameter can be used to pass additional flags as command line options to the program configured to be used when sending mail, as defined by the sendmail_path configuration setting. For example, this can be used to set the envelope sender address when using sendmail with the -f sendmail option.

This parameter is escaped by escapeshellcmd() internally to prevent command execution. escapeshellcmd() prevents command execution, but allows to add additional parameters. For security reasons, it is recommended for the user to sanitize this parameter to avoid adding unwanted parameters to the shell command.

Since escapeshellcmd() is applied automatically, some characters that are allowed as email addresses by internet RFCs cannot be used. mail() can not allow such characters, so in programs where the use of such characters is required, alternative means of sending emails (such as using a framework or a library) is recommended.

The user that the webserver runs as should be added as a trusted user to the sendmail configuration to prevent a ‘X-Warning’ header from being added to the message when the envelope sender (-f) is set using this method. For sendmail users, this file is /etc/mail/trusted-users .

Return Values

Returns true if the mail was successfully accepted for delivery, false otherwise.

It is important to note that just because the mail was accepted for delivery, it does NOT mean the mail will actually reach the intended destination.

Changelog

Version	Description
7.2.0	The additional_headers parameter now also accepts an array .

Examples

Example #1 Sending mail.

Using mail() to send a simple email:

// The message
$message = «Line 1\r\nLine 2\r\nLine 3» ;

// In case any of our lines are larger than 70 characters, we should use wordwrap()
$message = wordwrap ( $message , 70 , «\r\n» );

// Send
mail ( ‘caffeinated@example.com’ , ‘My Subject’ , $message );
?>

Example #2 Sending mail with extra headers.

The addition of basic headers, telling the MUA the From and Reply-To addresses:

$to = ‘nobody@example.com’ ;
$subject = ‘the subject’ ;
$message = ‘hello’ ;
$headers = ‘From: webmaster@example.com’ . «\r\n» .
‘Reply-To: webmaster@example.com’ . «\r\n» .
‘X-Mailer: PHP/’ . phpversion ();

mail ( $to , $subject , $message , $headers );
?>

Example #3 Sending mail with extra headers as array

This example sends the same mail as the example immediately above, but passes the additional headers as array (available as of PHP 7.2.0).

$to = ‘nobody@example.com’ ;
$subject = ‘the subject’ ;
$message = ‘hello’ ;
$headers = array(
‘From’ => ‘webmaster@example.com’ ,
‘Reply-To’ => ‘webmaster@example.com’ ,
‘X-Mailer’ => ‘PHP/’ . phpversion ()
);

mail ( $to , $subject , $message , $headers );
?>

Example #4 Sending mail with an additional command line parameter.

The additional_params parameter can be used to pass an additional parameter to the program configured to use when sending mail using the sendmail_path .

Example #5 Sending HTML email

It is also possible to send HTML email with mail() .

// Multiple recipients
$to = ‘johny@example.com, sally@example.com’ ; // note the comma

// Subject
$subject = ‘Birthday Reminders for August’ ;

// Message
$message = ‘

Here are the birthdays upcoming in August!

Person	Day	Month	Year
Johny	10th	August	1970
Sally	17th	August	1973

‘ ;

// To send HTML mail, the Content-type header must be set
$headers [] = ‘MIME-Version: 1.0’ ;
$headers [] = ‘Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1’ ;

// Additional headers
$headers [] = ‘To: Mary , Kelly ‘ ;
$headers [] = ‘From: Birthday Reminder ‘ ;
$headers [] = ‘Cc: birthdayarchive@example.com’ ;
$headers [] = ‘Bcc: birthdaycheck@example.com’ ;

// Mail it
mail ( $to , $subject , $message , implode ( «\r\n» , $headers ));
?>

Note:

If intending to send HTML or otherwise Complex mails, it is recommended to use the PEAR package » PEAR::Mail_Mime.

Notes

Note:

The SMTP implementation (Windows only) of mail() differs in many ways from the sendmail implementation. First, it doesn’t use a local binary for composing messages but only operates on direct sockets which means a MTA is needed listening on a network socket (which can either on the localhost or a remote machine).

Second, the custom headers like From: , Cc: , Bcc: and Date: are not interpreted by the MTA in the first place, but are parsed by PHP.

As such, the to parameter should not be an address in the form of «Something «. The mail command may not parse this properly while talking with the MTA.

Note:

It is worth noting that the mail() function is not suitable for larger volumes of email in a loop. This function opens and closes an SMTP socket for each email, which is not very efficient.

For the sending of large amounts of email, see the » PEAR::Mail, and » PEAR::Mail_Queue packages.

See Also

Источник