"From" Gets Turned Into ">From"

partypete

Hello,

The problem may be with Outlook, I'm not sure.

I have a contact form that is sent using PHP, but for some reason if "From" is the first word on a line in the $message portion, it get's changed to ">From" when I get the e-mail in Outlook.

/* E-mail Variables */
$mailname = $fvd_name;
$maildomain = $sv_domain;
$mailsubject = $fvd_subject;
$mailemail = $fv_email;
$mailoffer = $fvd_offer;
$mailmessage = nl2br($fvd_message);
/* recipients */
$to = "Gateway Domains <name@domain.com>";
$subject = "$mailsubject";

/* message */
$message = 
"From Person: $mailname<br>
E-mail: $mailemail<br>
Domain: $maildomain<br>
Offer: $mailoffer<br>
From Country:
<br>
========= MESSAGE ==========<br>
<br>
$mailmessage<br>
<br>
";

/* To send HTML mail, you can set the Content-type header. */
$headers  = "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\r\n";

/* additional headers */
$headers .= "From: $mailname <$mailemail>\r\n";

$headers .= "Reply-To: $mailname <$mailemail>\r\n";

$headers .= "Bcc: ";

/* and now mail it */
mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers, '-f$mailemail');
header("Location: /contact.php?sent=Y");
	} // end if($vald_form == "P")

So if after being parsed the message section looked like this:

$message = 
"From Person: John Doe<br>
E-mail: johndoe@hisdomain.com<br>
Domain: somedomainname.com<br>
Offer: $100<br>
From Country: Fakeistan<br>
<br>
========= MESSAGE ==========<br>
<br>
From what price would you be willing to negotiate?<br>
<br>
";

I would get the e-mail in Outlook like this:

>From Person: John Doe
E-mail: johndoe@hisdomain.com
Domain: somedomainname.com
Offer: $100
From Country: Fakeistan

========= MESSAGE ==========

From what price would you be willing to negotiate?

Notice how the three instances of "From" have been changed to ">From". When I send the form contents to my gmail or yahoo account instead I don't see the ">". Maybe those accounts are NOT parsing the e-mail as HTML. Outlook is. Is there something about the way Outlook handles the HTML?

If anyone has experienced this or has any tips, that would be appreciated.
Thanks!

Peter

jkurrle

What happens if you preface the message with an <html> tag first?

MarkR

I think this is a limitation of plain text emails - they can't contain any line which starts From

To resolve this, send it encoded somehow (I think quoted-printable is typical). I don't know how to do this easily from PHP.

PHP's mail function sends the raw message exactly as you specified it. There should be some way to send a more "cooked" one.

Mark

partypete

As suggested, I tried adding <html> tags as seen below, but this unfortunately did not change anything:

/* message */
$message =
"<html>
From Person: $mailname<br>
E-mail: $mailemail<br>
Domain: $maildomain<br>
Offer: $mailoffer<br>
From Country:
<br>
========= MESSAGE ==========<br>
<br>
$mailmessage<br>
<br>
</html>
";

And MarkR,

I thought this portion caused the e-mail to be sent as HTML?:

/* To send HTML mail, you can set the Content-type header. */
$headers  = "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\r\n";

I will look more into encoding the message as you recommended.

Thanks.