PHP mail() turns text with special characters into attachments

[Jeroen Belleman]

I use the PHP mail() function to send emails to a special interest group.
Some of these mails are in English, no problems, and some of them are in
French. For the latter, the message body text gets turned into an
attachment, and the mail body remains empty. Apparently, it's the
presence of accented characters that triggers this.

The problem appeared when we recently moved the site to a different host.
Both the old and the new host are Linux machines, running PHP 5.4.16 and
Apache 20120211.

Any ideas as to how to prevent my French text from getting hidden away
in an attachment?

Thanks,
Jeroen Belleman

[Arno Welzel]

Jeroen Belleman, 2022-08-31 13:56:

> I use the PHP mail() function to send emails to a special interest group.
> Some of these mails are in English, no problems, and some of them are in
> French. For the latter, the message body text gets turned into an
> attachment, and the mail body remains empty. Apparently, it's the
> presence of accented characters that triggers this.

Why an attachement? Why not just adding the appropriate MIME headers
about the encoding and sending the text as UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1 or to be
safe using quoted-printable for the transport?

Also see:

<https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.quoted-printable-encode.php>

> The problem appeared when we recently moved the site to a different host.
> Both the old and the new host are Linux machines, running PHP 5.4.16 and
> Apache 20120211.

The first release of PHP 5.4 is more than 10(!) years old that version
is *way* outdated!

You should not use that version at all. Before doing any problem
analysis you should first upgrade your environment. Besides possible
security problems also bugs may be present which got fixed in newer version.

Please update to at least PHP 7.4 or 8.0 and make sure your code works
with that version (there are some breaking changes in PHP 7/8 compared
to 5):

<https://www.php.net/supported-versions.php>

> Any ideas as to how to prevent my French text from getting hidden away
> in an attachment?

As suggested above - do not use attachements but just add the text with
an appropriate encoding. There is no need to use attachments just
because you use 8-bit characters.

You can also use PHPMailer to make this process easier (which of course
also requires a decent PHP version):

<https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer>




--
Arno Welzel
https://arnowelzel.de

[Jeroen Belleman]

On 2022-08-31 14:53, Arno Welzel wrote:
> Jeroen Belleman, 2022-08-31 13:56:
>
>> I use the PHP mail() function to send emails to a special interest group.
>> Some of these mails are in English, no problems, and some of them are in
>> French. For the latter, the message body text gets turned into an
>> attachment, and the mail body remains empty. Apparently, it's the
>> presence of accented characters that triggers this.
>

> Why an attachement?[...]

I realize my wording was ambiguous. I *don't* want the French text
to become an attachment.

I haven't yet worked out the right sequence of incantations, but at
least you have given me a lead. Thanks.

> [...]

>
> Please update to at least PHP 7.4 or 8.0 and make sure your code works
> with that version (there are some breaking changes in PHP 7/8 compared
> to 5):

That's outside my jurisdiction.

Again, thanks.

Jeroen Belleman

[Arne Vajhøj]

Non-ASCII should be encoded. Both in headers and body.

function header_encode($str) {
return '=?ISO-8859-1?Q?' . qp_encode($str) . '?=';
}
function body_encode($str) {
return qp_encode($str, true);
}
...
$headers = ... .
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1\r\n" .
... .
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable";

or something similar.

Arne

[Jeroen Belleman]

Thanks for your comments. I think I identified another problem
though. None of the Content-* directives I put in the header at
the sending end remain intact at the receiving end. Small wonder
the mail client doesn't know what to do. Grumble.

The sending end uses xmail rather than sendmail. I wonder if
that may be an issue. I'm beginning to wonder if I'm not better
off moving everything back to the old host.

Never try to fix something that works...

Jeroen Belleman

[Arno Welzel]

Jeroen Belleman, 2022-08-31 15:58:

Then tell that those people who are responsible for the hosting. Keeping
outdated software running just because nobody wants to change anything
is never a good advise. At some point the stuff gets so old that you
literally need to throw it away and create a complete new solution.

[He, who travels time to time]

Hey... Want to talk? Call me.... My telephone number >>>>

(+372) 56330687