Bad Header problem when sending mail through php

[Demian]

Hi guys, I am new here and also in php.

I'm trying to send an email to a list of recipients stored in a text file. The text file contains for example the following:

User1 <[e-mail]>, User2 <[e-mail]>, .... etc., etc.

The problem is that at registration some recipients have added quotes or accents to their display names, now having something like this:

User1 <[e-mail]>, User2 "the user" accéntedlastname <[e-mail]>, ... etc., etc.

And when I receive the mail in some of my accounts I get the following advise

X-Amavis-Alert: BAD HEADER Non-encoded 8-bit data (char EF hex) in message header 'To': To: \357\273\277User1 <user1...

Also the to: field shows some strange characters before the first name:

To: User1 <user1..

My specific question is below the following code wich is the one I use to send the email....

<?php

$filename= 'usersfile.txt';
$file = fopen($filename, "r" );
$recipients = fread($file, filesize($filename));
fclose($file);

$to = $recipients;
$title = "The title";
$from = "ME <[e-mail]>";

$headers = "MIME-Version: 1.0" . "\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" . "\r\n";
$headers .= "From: ".$from."\r\n";
$headers .= "Reply-To: ".$from."\r\n";
$headers .= "Return-Path: ".$from."\r\n";

$message = "Some message";

mail($to, $title, $message, $headers);

?>

So, Do I need to make some encoding of the text stored in the txt file, i.e the recipients variable? Is that the problem?

Any help would be great Thanks!!!.
Demian

[greenie2600]

I can think of two possible solutions, but I'm not sure which one is correct.

You've specified ISO-8859-1 as your content-type. That specification expects ASCII text, with any freaky characters expressed as HTML entities (e.g., &amp😉.

So you may just need to use htmlentities() on any suspect strings - bearing in mind that htmlentities() will also convert < and > to their entity equivalents. So you can't just encode the entire list of recipients; you'd have to split it apart using explode() or something similar, and only encode the actual email address.

The second possible solution would be to use a character set which supports freaky characters:

Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-15

I'm not sure how mail servers and mail readers would respond to this, though.