My PHP script sends email to users and when the email arrives to their mailboxes, the subject line ($subject
) has characters like a^£
added to the end of my subject text. This is obviously and encoding problem. The email message content itself is fine, just the subject line is broken.
I have searched all over but can’t find how to encode my subject properly.
This is my header. Notice that I’m using Content-Type
with charset=utf-8
and Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
.
//set all necessary headers $headers = "From: $sender_name<$from>n"; $headers .= "Reply-To: $sender_name<$from>n"; $headers .= "X-Sender: $sender_name<$from>n"; $headers .= "X-Mailer: PHP4n"; //mailer $headers .= "X-Priority: 3n"; //1 UrgentMessage, 3 Normal $headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0n"; $headers .= "X-MSMail-Priority: Highn"; $headers .= "Importance: 3n"; $headers .= "Date: $daten"; $headers .= "Delivered-to: $ton"; $headers .= "Return-Path: $sender_name<$from>n"; $headers .= "Envelope-from: $sender_name<$from>n"; $headers .= "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bitn"; $headers .= "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8n";
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Answer
Update For a more practical and up-to-date answer, have a look at Palec’s answer.
The specified character encoding in Content-Type does only describe the character encoding of the message body but not the header. You need to use the encoded-word syntax with either the quoted-printable encoding or the Base64 encoding:
encoded-word = "=?" charset "?" encoding "?" encoded-text "?="
You can use imap_8bit
for the quoted-printable encoding and base64_encode
for the Base64 encoding:
"Subject: =?UTF-8?B?".base64_encode($subject)."?=" "Subject: =?UTF-8?Q?".imap_8bit($subject)."?="