Comments on: PHP mail() function and GMail

By: paddingtondesign

paddingtondesign — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 15:27:57 +0000

yep, same problem here. stripping out the \r fixed it for me in gmail…
if (preg_match('/gmail/',$email_address)) $headers = str_replace("\r\n","\n",$headers);

By: rodrigo

rodrigo — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 20:58:38 +0000

I had the same problem too and after a lot of hours trying to solve it, you save me!
Thanks!
Rodrigo

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 19:10:22 +0000

We had this exact same problem. Removing \r fixed it as well. Thanks.

By: Dean

Dean — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 14:43:11 +0000

I had the same problem and the removal of the \r fixed it. Thanks, Martin.

By: Martin

Martin — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 22:44:39 +0000

This was stupid. My script didn’t work with gmail until I stripped \r and just used \n. Both created a double rowbreak resulting in gmail thinking headers were all sent after first row.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 23:35:38 +0000

Swift Mailer is newer and in active development. PHPMailer died a quiet death a couple of years ago (just look at the last change on SF.net!) yet everybody still insists upon using it. It’s also pretty nasty OOP

Swift Mailer will be making it’s next release very soon which actually provides the ability to compose your email with swift and send it elsewhere among other enhancements such as an improved plugin API.

I am more commonly seeing Swift recommended as a standard these days over PHPMailer although there still seem to be a lot of people who stick with the one that started first for whatever reasons they have.

*cough* if you hadn’t guessed, I wrote swift hence the slightly biased post

By: richard

richard — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 15:36:31 +0000

Jan, the mail() function will always send mail as iso 8559-1, that's why it fails with characters in any other encoding. However, mb_send_mail() is specifically intended for sending mail using other encodings (it's part of the mbstring extension for PHP and is intended as a direct replacement for mail() where other encodings are required).

My original setup used mb_send_mail() to send UTF-8 mail. This worked fine with all the mail readers I've tested it with apart from GMail.

Even when sending iso-8559-1 mail using the mail() function, GMail fails to use the sender data from the header and shows the sender as unknown - this is the second problem outlined above.

I looked at PHPMailer but was dissuaded by the complexity of the interface and the fact that it doesn't appear to be worked on currently - the latest version is 16 months old. Not that there's anything wrong with that but my brief comparison with Swift Mailer suggests the latter has a similar feature set with a simpler interface.

By: Ante Vrli

Ante Vrli — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 15:36:27 +0000

I'm using simple mail() and have no problems with GMail. It could be I guessed some special order of headers that GMail prefers. I don't know. Here's the code anyway:

$headers = "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-2\r\nContent-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\r\nX-Priority: 1\r\nX-MSMail-Priority: High\r\n";
$headers .= "From: $from\r\n" . "Reply-To: $from\r\n" . "X-Mailer: PHP/" . phpversion() . "\r\nX-originating-IP: " . remoteaddr () . "\r\n";
$success = @mail ($to, $subject, $message, $headers);

By: Jan Gorman

Jan Gorman — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 22:22:03 +0000

Maybe try using PHPMailer http://phpmailer.sourceforge.net/

I have discovered though, that I need to set the mail encoding to iso 8559-1 or whatever it is when sending out multipart and pure text messages, otherwise the special characters in German all get stuffed up (with any mailer btw.).
Oh, and in case you’re using some sort of templates coming from files that were stored in utf8, a utf8_decode before putting the string into the mail helps as well. Maybe that’s your issue right there.