can you send a file with the mail function?

[styler1971]

Hi,

I want to gather data from an html form to be sent to my email and have been using the mail function fine for this, although for the first time i have added a section allowing the user to upload a file. When this sends i just get the text of the file name.

Is it possible to send a file with the mail function?

thanks for your help

[PHPist]

Sending file with email attachment it's like send file via HTTP protocol. You need to serialize file contents by base64_encode(), and put headers what indicate attached file type:

<?php
$attachment = base64_encode ( file_get_contents("name_of_file.bin" ) );
$headers.= "
Content-Type: application/bin; name='name_of_file.bin'
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: attachment;
";
mail($email, $subject, "Some text to send as message", $headers);
?>

[NogDog]

Most of the mail classes such as PHPMailer have methods for adding file attachments, so that you don't have to worry about the protocol details for multi-part MIME messages and such. (The above reply appears to be on the right track for doing it manually, though it appears to be missing the piece where the attachment is . . . well . . . attached. 😉 The mail() manual page has a number of examples in the Users' Notes section, as well as some links to external articles about mail attachments.