File download via PHP and send mail

[Anon]

Hello

Maybe this is a bit weird or even blocked by PHP cause it could be used to spam someone really scary, but here's the question:

How do I 1st) download a file from the web (http, ftp) onto my server and then email it via the mail() function to a specified adress, attaching it to the mail as a binary?

A search through the forum has resulted in nothing so I just asked. If it's possible to code this I'd like to use it to mail files to my mailbox at home, cause at work I don't want to download them first and then mail it, and second my mailbox max volume is fairly large and downloading mail is faster and more comfortable than mailing myself just the link home.

Thanks for your attention and any help,
Pantheon

[Anon]

about downloading the file : you could open en read it with the php file functions just like a string I guess.

just 2day I was looking for exactly the same thin... I need to attatch a file to an email. have searched the forum but couldnt find anything about that 🙁

Could someone plz tel me if it can be done at all with PHP and if so how ?

[Anon]

Hi, I found this :

http://renoir.vill.edu/~ylee/mailfile.html

Gonna try it right now

[Anon]

Before I continue - let me just say that mail shouldn't really be used for this kind of transfer - it IS used for this kind of transfer, but it really shouldn't be - this is what FTP was made for 😉

Now...if you're on a *nix system, you could use wget to grab the file, assuming you have the url...

exec("wget -P yourdir http://www.blah.org/file.zip");

yourdir should be writable by php

(note that if you're planning on passing the URL in from a form, you'll want to use EscapeShellCmd() on the input string first for security reasons)

Now - once you've gotten the file - it'll be in yourdir/file.zip - one down, one to go - now we have to get the file into an email.

I'm not going to get deeply into MIME stuff here - you basically create a MIME email header and boundary, then use the boundary to seperate the body from the file itself - this all gets saved to a single string, which is then passed to the mail() function. (this is greatly oversimplified 😉 )

In any case, there's an article on PHPBuilder that should get you started:

http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/kartic20000807.php3

In addition, the new Beginning PHP4 Wrox book has a nice little section on MIME that should help you out too =)

-b3

[Anon]

Now that I wrote this, I noticed that fopen() will also do http streams - so wget isn't necessary - just read the file in that way 😉

:😁:

[Anon]

hehe...

thanx alot..

btw, I just tested the classes at the url I posted in the message above and they work great... very simple and all php.

🙂

[Anon]

Well, nearly works.

$sendto="[e-mail]";
$mimetype = "multipart/mixed";

$newmail = new CMailFile($subject,$sendto,$replyto,$message,$filetoattach,$mimetype);
$newmail->sendfile();

Where $filetoattach is a HTML form input file, it does not attach itself to the mail. When executing the script a mail is being sent but without attachment. How did you make this work?

thanks in advance.

[Anon]

Well acyually I havent tried attatching an uploaded file.. I just put a file in the same dir as the script and sent a mail. the file was attatched so i assumed this would work the same way for files that are uploaded by an user throygh a form.

but Im gonna try it now. so Ill get back to this.

[danin800]

This is a way to let an person upload a file through a form and then the file being send as an email attachment to you.

hope it helps. Ps you will need the class file (in my case mail.php) wich is the file i linked to in a previous mssg in this thread.

<?
if (!$submit)
{
echo "<form method=\"post\" action=\"$PHP_SELF\" enctype=\"multipart/form-data\">";
echo "<INPUT TYPE=\"hidden\" name=\"MAX_FILE_SIZE\" value=\"1000000\">\n";
echo "<tr><td>Foto:</td><td><input type=\"file\" name=\"form_data\" size=\"20\"></td></tr>";
echo "<tr><td height=15>&nbsp</td></tr>\n";
echo "<tr><td><input type=\"submit\" name=\"submit\" value=\"submit\"></td></tr>\n";
echo "</form>";
}
else
{
require("mail.php");

$subject = "An Email with an attachment";
$sendto = "[e-mail]";
$replyto = "[e-mail]";
$message = "The body of your email here.";
$filetoattach = "$form_data";
$mimetype = "$form_data_type";

$newmail = new CMailFile($subject,$sendto,$replyto,$message,$filetoattach,$mimetype,"bijlage"); 
$newmail->sendfile();
echo "Email has been sent.";

}
?>

[pantheon]

Hmmmm nearly works, again. This time 2 mails arrive, one with the content as it should be, and another one with nothing in it, just a TO adressed and that's it.
The file extension isn't saved too, so when opening the mail there is an attachment but without extension identifying itself what type of file it is.

Have you encountered this problems too? Really critical is only that it sends 2 mails where only 1 is nessecary.

Thanks
Pantheon

[Anon]

No I did not have these problems 🙁

the code as I pasted it below works for me.

the extension is saved by using the $filetoattach = "$form_data";
$mimetype = "$form_data_type";

this gives the right parameters to the class function so it should work.

Meeby it has something to do with your webserver / php configuration ?

[Anon]

Joni,

[danin800]

ehmz.. yeah ?

[Anon]

Never mind, I figured it out. It was a simple case of the php.ini file not set correctly, and the mail function would not work. Sorry for the half message, I got interrupted. Thanks.