mail() function randomly dropping characters???

zman

Hello!

Just registered here after troubleshooting a problem for over 8 hours and I can't figure it out and I'm about to go crazy trying.

My problem is that I'm trying to send a very basic HTML email message which contains really only tables and font codes. No pics or anything like that, just text and tables.

The HTML email is being generated via a php script which has "if" statements in it and all kinds of stuff but that's not the problem. The problem is RANDOM in that it will randomly drop HTML coding characters out of the middle of the the email message variable. What I'm doing is generating an order page for an ecommerce site and sending an email to both the customer and store owner. Both emails use the SAME variable for the message (body of the email) but are dropping different characters. Sometimes just one, sometimes several in different spots, and sometimes it works just fine. I'll then make another order and it will drop different characters which makes the table messed up or underlines something or messes up the font, etc.

Since I'm testing this and have multiple email address (through Road Runner so not hotmail or yahoo or anything like that) I have one setup as the store owner and another setup as the customer. So, just to make this even more confusing is that the emails are not only being sent from the same server but are coming to me via the same email client???

Just as an example...

When I view the sorce of an email that has the font messed up in a certain cell of a table, this is what I see...

The reason why it isn't working is obvious... it is dropping the "O" in FONT but how is that? This is in the MIDDLE of the variable so it's not like it is even not appending the variable correctly in my code.

Now, in the other email that was sent at exactly the same time it WILL have the "O" when I view the source but it might drop off a space between, for example a <table align = blah command and it will be instead <tablealign so then it doesn't see the table tag in that email and messes it all up too but in a different way.

The mail() functions are on top of each other in the php code too like this..

mail("$email", $subject, $email_body, $headers);
mail("$site_email", $subject, $email_body, $headers);

As you can see, it is sending the same message variable but somehow after/during this it is dropping random characters in the email itself by the time it arrives to me!

I've searched Google for answers, I've searched here, and can find nothing relating to this problem 🙁

I've tried putting nothing at the end of each line. I've tried putting \n at the end of each line. I've tried putting \r\n. All kinds of stuff and nothing seems to work any better than anything else?

Here are my headers...

           $headers = "From: ".$site_business." <".$site_email.">\r\n";
           $headers.= "Reply-To: ".$site_business." <".$site_email.">\r\n";
           $headers.= "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
           $headers.= "Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\r\n\r\n";

My machine is a Windows XP Pro machine and I'm using Outlook 2003.

The server machine is a Windows 2000 server running IIS.

Any help or advice anybody can give would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!!!

zman

Hmm... good to see that I'm not the only one who doesn't know what the heck is going on 🙂

If you don't have a solution, have you ever seen this before? If you've seen this before please let me know so that way I know I'm not totally losing my mind! hahaha

If it'll help I can provide pics, screen shots, etc. Just let me know! 😉

Thanks!

maxpup979

are you experiencing the same behavior in different mail clients?

dalecosp

I would guess that providing the code might be the thing to do.

However, what you describe seems so bizarre that I can't even begin to think what might be happening, apart from the fact that I prefer to utilize systems whose software wasn't made by a bunch of greedy corporate bozos in Redmond, WA.

So maybe you should run 'Nix everywhere.

But, more seriously, I've no idea. Maybe you have a virus 😃

webdes03

Ok guys... I just went through the same issue... certain ISP's were chopping my email off because they were being sent out as one string. ISP's were adding the following to the headers of the emails: "iPlanet-SMTP-Warning: Lines longer than SMTP allows found and truncated." Their truncation resulted in the cutoff of about half of my email...

I was sending HTML email like this:

mail($to,$subject,$body,"From: ".$name." <noreply@".$the_domain.">\n".$headers)

My HTML was being thrown in as one line, $body.

What I did to get around it was use a combination of explode() and wordwrap() to make my HTML multiple lines. It sounds strange... but it worked and all of my email is getting through now. I chose to make a new line every 200 characters, but you can set this however you like.

$msgtext=stripslashes($body);
$msgbody = explode('|', wordwrap($msgtext, 200, "\n"));
foreach($msgbody as $key => $value){
  $body.=$value;
}

Maybe that will help some of you... I know it bugged me for hours...

zman

maxpup979 wrote:
are you experiencing the same behavior in different mail clients?

Thanks for taking a look at this! 🙂

I just added to the list my gmail, hotmail, and yahoo accounts.

I placed an order. To one of my Outlook emails the order looked FINE believe it or not! To the other one in one of the table cells I had a "br>" before the normal text and it was missing the line break... it dropped off the beginning "<" and hence the reason for the lack of line break and "br> showing up.

In my gmail account it didn't recognice the &nbsp so it printed that instead of a space. That's a different issue but easily fixable I think if I just put a space there. hahhaa BUT, one of the table cells had the wrong font. I viewed the source and here is what I got for that cell... <font face=\"Tahoa\" size=\"-1\"> Again, the problem is obvious in that for this cell it left the "m" off in "Tahoma" so that's why it went to the default font.

In my hotmail account, for ONE of the &nbsp it dropped one character so it printed &nsp instead of seeing it as a space. Once again, dropping a character in the damn middle of something???

In my yahoo account, the email looked good.

And, keep in mind, I have all these email going out AT THE SAME TIME and are dropping DIFFERENT pieces of code?!?!? Here is the code in my php file for sending all these emails at once...

mail("$email", $subject, $email_body, $headers);
mail("$site_email", $subject, $email_body, $headers);
mail("xxxxxxxxxx@gmail.com", $subject, $email_body, $headers);
mail("xxxxxxxxxx@yahoo.com", $subject, $email_body, $headers);
mail("xxxxxxxxxx@hotmail.com", $subject, $email_body, $headers);

As you can see, absolutely nothing happens that should be changing the $subject variable between the time the emails are being sent... expecially changing it in such a way as to drop random characters.

I am more than stumped 🙁 This HAS to be server related but why and how to fix it is going to kill me. hahahaa Server is a Windows 2000 Server box running IIS and has PHP Version: 4.3.3

Thanks!

zman

dalecosp wrote:
I would guess that providing the code might be the thing to do.

However, what you describe seems so bizarre that I can't even begin to think what might be happening, apart from the fact that I prefer to utilize systems whose software wasn't made by a bunch of greedy corporate bozos in Redmond, WA.

So maybe you should run 'Nix everywhere.

But, more seriously, I've no idea. Maybe you have a virus 😃

I could provide the code but it would take up a few pages. 😃 Plus, I don't believe it to be code related due to the fact that it happens randomly within the same variable!!! 🙂

The server isn't mine so I can't control what OS is being run on it. Would definitely be easier if it were nix oriented but that ain't going to happen. hahaha

And, yes, this is VERY BIZARRE!!!!

Thanks for trying and if you have any other ideas, shoot them on over. hahaaa

zman

webdes03 wrote:
Ok guys... I just went through the same issue... certain ISP's were chopping my email off because they were being sent out as one string. ISP's were adding the following to the headers of the emails: "iPlanet-SMTP-Warning: Lines longer than SMTP allows found and truncated." Their truncation resulted in the cutoff of about half of my email...

My problem is completely different I'm afraid. I wish my emails were being truncated because that is an easy thing to troubleshoot. My emails are going through in their entirety but with single characters in the code being randomly left off at random intervals and in different spots each time it happens??? The dropping of the single characters means that font commands aren't recognized, line breaks aren't done, tables commands don't always happen, etc. But, the next time it might go through fine. So, I'm baffled 🙂

zman

No other ideas there guys? 🙂

Do you think it would help to upgrade to a newer version of PHP? I'm a little reluctant to do so because I've read about some issues with PHP 5 dealing with some of the programs I use on the server. Or, do you think this has nothing at all to do with the PHP version? Thanks!