html attachments on Hotmail

[Neumy]

I've discovered an interesting problem with sending html attachments to Hotmail.

I'm generating a report based off a form questionnaire. This report is nicely laid out in a printer friendly way with headers and footers etc. I am now adding the functionality to e-mail this report to whoever the user wants to (most likely themselves). Currently, I've worked through most problems and can successfully dynamically attach the html file to the e-mail and send it with MIME as an attachment. I've tested it on Yahoo and Outlook where it worked wonderfully; but Hotmail nicely wrecks all my hard work.

Every time I view the e-mail, it takes the html file and appends it to the bottom of my message. Hotmail is not acknowledging the attachment and by appending it to the existing e-mail, all my formatting is wrong. Hotmail has even not included my CSS.

I’m not a big Microsoft fan (so I’m not expecting much) but many people rely heavily on Hotmail and my report needs to work there. Even if I can just ensure a file exists so they can save and open it outside of Hotmail.

If anyone can help me out trying to get around Hotmail I would be grateful. I’ve included my e-mailing functions if I’m doing something wrong with MIME.

[bridawg]

Hey, I think I'm looking to do the same thing you've accomplished but I'm so lost. As of now, I've got $message which holds the complete html code for a pretty html report generated based on what form values are passed that I send into an email and it displays nicely in outlook and other html friendly email clients. I wish to send this $message as a .html attachment but am lost as to how to do this, can anyone give me a bare bones code for doing this?

[Neumy]

bridawg, I was on holidays until now - this might be late, but I hope it can still help.

I ended up not sending a html attachment. I found that my carefully generated attachments where modified in too many email clients. Hotmail, Outlook, Mozilla, ... they all displayed the code differently. I ended up creating a pdf document: I ended up using http://www.ros.co.nz/pdf/.

As for the php code - here is what I used - you will have to look through it and modify it here and there of course.

<?php

$email = $_POST['mail_to'];
$check = checkmail($email);
if ($check) {
	$message = send_mail($email);
	header("Location: /view_results.php?message=$message");
	exit;
} 
else 
	$message = "Please enter valid e-mail address.";


function checkmail($address)
{
	if(ereg("([[:alnum:]\.\-]+)(\@[[:alnum:]\.\-]+\.+)", $address))
		return true; 
	else
		return false; 
} // function checkmail()

function send_mail($mail_to)
{
	// Read POST request params into global vars
	$to      = $mail_to;
	$from    = "Report <[e-mail]>";
	$subject = "Report Completed";
	$message = "";

// Obtain file vars
$fileatt = $type."_report.pdf";
$fileatt_type = "application/pdf";
$fileatt_name = $type."_report.pdf";

$headers = "From: $from";

$report = createReport();
$file = BuildAttachment($report);

// Generate a boundary string
$semi_rand = md5(time());
$mime_boundary = "==Multipart_Boundary_x{$semi_rand}x";

// Add the headers for a file attachment
$headers .= "\nMIME-Version: 1.0\n" .
          "Content-Type: multipart/mixed;\n" .
          " boundary=\"{$mime_boundary}\"";

// Add a multipart boundary above the plain message
$message = "This is a multi-part message in MIME format.\n\n" .
         "--{$mime_boundary}\n" .
         "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=\"iso-8859-1\"\n" .
         "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit\n\n" .
         $message . "\n\n";

// Add file attachment to the message
$message .= "--{$mime_boundary}\n" .
          "Content-Type: {$fileatt_type};\n" .
          " name=\"{$fileatt_name}\"\n" .
          //"Content-Disposition: attachment;\n" .
          //" filename=\"{$fileatt_name}\"\n" .
          "Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64\n\n" .
          $file . "\n\n" .
          "--{$mime_boundary}--\n";

// Send the message
if (@mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers))
	return "Successfully sent report";
else
	return "An unknown error occurred while attempting to send report";
} // function send_mail()

function BuildAttachment($string) 
{ 
	set_magic_quotes_runtime(0); 
	$FileContent = chunk_split(base64_encode($string)); 
	$attachment = $FileContent; 
	$attachment .="\n\n"; 
	set_magic_quotes_runtime(get_magic_quotes_gpc());
	return $attachment; 
} // function BuildAttachment()

function createReport()
{
	include pdf_report.inc';
	$report = $pdf->output();
	return $report;
} // function createReport()

?>