HTML Formatted Email

gushy

Ok, I don't need some fancy MIME class that can do multiple attachements in emails etc. I just need a nice simple solution to sending an email, that can have a hyperlink in it.

HELP !!!!

[deleted]

Most modern mail readers interpret anything that starts with "http://" as a link... but that's more of a feature than a standard.

gushy

Not exactly what I need. I basically want to use <a href> tags so that 'my site' becomes a link to my site.

Any ideas?

neville

Try this and tell me if it works.

$MAIL_BODY = include("path/to/htmlfile.htm");

mail("$to","$subject","$MAIL_BODY","From:youradd\nContent-type:text/html");

the $MAIL_BODY should contain a string that has all your html code. You can even show images which are physically on your site. However for non web-based mail clients the user will have to be connected to the net so that the images can download.

Neville Lewis.

[deleted]

What you are doing here is just sending an HTML file as the body of a plaintext email.

That will loook like total sh*t on any non-html enabled mailreader. Not very user-friendly.

The nice part about Mime is that it sends a plaintext copy, followed by the HTML version.
Then it's up to the mailreader to find the HTML version and display it instead of the plaintext version.

gushy

It's a good point vincent. Thanks anyway Neville.

So how do I do it then? I've found a couple of classes to send all-singing-all-dancing mime emails. But I just need a simple HTML formatted email. Surely it can't be moe than 3 lines of code. What I want to know is what is that code?!

[deleted]

I'm affraid you'll have to do some reading..
there are a few articles on this site that explain some about mime etc...

I'm waaay too lazy to figure it out for you :-)

neville

Does that mean that by using Mime the client will deciede whether or not it is capable of displaying html and if not then suck out just the text ignoring the html and display it.

The way I mentioned will work on any web-based messaging service, correct ?

Then again we can ask the visitor requesting emails, if his mail client can display html and send accordingly :-)

Whaddya say ??

Anon

Neville,
I tried the solution suggested above, and was partially successful, but I cannot get the include part of it to work. If I re-type the HTML code into PHP created HTML the mail() function works fine. If I try to include the same code (straight HTML code) the email has a "1" in it, and the message that is popped to the screen is the text content of the HTML document.
For one of the things that I need to do this is fine, but we are planning on sending a weekly newsletter, and I am the only one who understands PHP, so I need to have the include() part to work.
Is there a stupid thing that I am overlooking? Is there a special way to tell the path of the .html document, or maybe the .html document needs to have a special header, etc. Thanks for any help.

Bruce Perry
USAchefs.com

neville

Hi Bruce,

Basically the include was just so that you get the entire html part done by an HTML guy and so that you don't have to actually sit down and write it to a string variable like so:

$MAIL_BODY= " <head></head><body> this is my html formatted mail ......</body>

This can really be painful if you want to change the layout of your HTML mail later on

A work around would be to read the contents of the HTML file into a string using the file handling functions of php fopen() and fread()

http://php.net/manual/en/function.fopen.php

http://php.net/manual/en/function.fread.php

Hope this helps,

Neville

Anon

Neville,
Thanks for the help. So the code that I needed ended up being:

// get contents of a file into a string
$filename = "test.html";
$fd = fopen ($filename, "r");
$contents = fread ($fd, filesize ($filename));
fclose ($fd);

 And then I used that in my mail command:

mail("me@mydomain.com", "This is a test", $contents, "From:me@mydomain.com\nContent-type:text/html");

Thanks alot for your help.  It is going to make the next project a little easier.  I love this web site. - Bruce

gushy

I'm still confused. 🙁

Whenever I try to use \nContent-type:text/html I just get plain text emails with the sender showing as:
text/html@testsite.com

Any idea why?

sparc-e

Ok, so I have the system so that it will pick up and email out the html document, but I have put some variables in the html code, and I can't for life of me figure out how to have the php script that is embedding and sending the html document convert the variable names over to the variable information. Any ideas?
Nick, I don't know what to tell you, the code worked for me that I typed in ... maybe it is not happy that you are not including all of the variable parts of the last part of the mail() command.
Thanks for any help that anyone has, good luck if you don't know. Talk to you. - Bruce

neville

I don't know why the variable is printing out its value... it should you know !

Anyway, a work around would be to execute that html-php document and write it to a flat file. Then you could read the contents of that flat file which has all your variables printed out

Hope this helps.

gushy

After a shed load of attempts at getting HTML formatted mail to work, I gave up, because the bast**d thing wouldn't play fair.

I've opted to use the class from http://www.heyes-computing.net/. It does far more than I need, but it works.

That's good for my system, just not for my knowledge. Maybe I'll try again sometime soon. Or maybe I'll just accept that the wheel has been invented and there is little reward in re-inventing. 🙂

Anon

Nick,

Did you ever find the MIME header specs needed to properly display the email when a recipient's email client cannot display html formated email ?
If so can you forward the info to me at: netreflex@netzero.net ?

Many thanks,
Peter Morrissette