HTML email with PHP

chewy

Hello,

I am using the PHP mail() function to send HTML formatted emails. I developed some code on my Windows machine and the emails were getting sent nicely using Outlook. Once my code was deployed to a Linix machine (email server is EXIM) the email content type does NOT seem to take effect. The emails get sent with HTML text in the body.

/ Headers /
$headers = "From: test@test.net>\r\n";
$headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\r\n";

/ Recipient. /
$to = $recipient;

/ Subject. /
$subject = "HTML email";

/ Message. /
$message = '
<html>
<head>
<title>Your membership with The Magic Flute</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>
This is a test.
</p>
</body>
</html>
';

/ Send the e-mail. /
return mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);

Are there issues with the Web Server user (nobody) sending HTML emails? Any ideas why it's sending HTML as text?

I appreciate your time and any help you can be.

nightowl

I have never heard that there would be a difference in priviledges of sending html mail or regular mail ...

chewy

I didn't think so. Any ideas then why it's sending the HTML as text?

nightowl

there is an article about this on this site

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

chewy

Thanks for the info. I have read probably every article on sending email with PHP. The MIME class is good but mail() is sufficient for what I need to do.

I have solved my problem with sending HTML emails with mail(). The solution was to remove the carriage return characters. The documentation on mail() says ...

"Note: You must use \r\n to seperate headers, although some Unix mail transfer agents may work with just a single newline (\n)."

Apparently, the Unix mail transfer agent I am using did not like the carriage return characters (\r), but did work with just the newline (\n). If anyone encounters the same problem I had then I would suggest removing the carriage return characters (\r).

🙂