random line break and "!" (mail)

djedery

Here's a stumper - when I use mail() to fire off a message (in HTML format) to someone, it randomly inserts an exclamation point and line break into the message body. If I simply echo the message body into a webpage, however, it comes out clean! Anyone had this problem? The code in question is:

mail($strEmailTo, "Form Submission", $msgBody, "From: $strEmailFrom\r\nContent-type: text/html\r\n");

$msgBody is put together from many other lines of code, but ultimately, if it echoes OK to screen, why won't it transmit correctly through email??

-dje

pnoeric

I'd look to your host machine's mail program, for starters. You may want to break down the message into 76-character lines before sending it; my guess is that the bang (!) and linebreak is probably where the mail program is having to insert a break because the line is too long.

good luck,
Eric

djedery

wow - never thought of that. Thanks tremendously for your input.

-dje

PS. know of any website that would contain useful information about the character of email protocols and popular programs and such? I'd like to learn more, and avoid quirks like this in the future.

pnoeric

Hey David, happy to help-- well, I hope that helps; like I said, it was just kinda my best guess at the time :-) Come back and let us know if that fixes it, please.

I don't know of a web site about this sort of thing-- only that sendmail and friends have their own bizarre personality quirks that can sometimes be very difficult to work with :-)

best,
Eric

djedery

Yup - this fixed it. I may have went overboard (I inserted quite a few line breaks throughout my code loops), but I wasn't sure how long of a string was "too long."

Thanks again! I'm really loving PHP... 🙂

Anon

I had this exact same problem and it turned out to be that I had Macintosh encoded files that a particular version of sendmail had problems with. I saved the files as Unix and it worked fine.