PHP Sending Email Sending Email With An Attachment Using mail()
Example
<?php
$to = '[email protected]';
$subject = 'Email Subject';
$message = 'This is the email message body';
$attachment = '/path/to/your/file.pdf';
$content = file_get_contents($attachment);
/* Attachment content transferred in Base64 encoding
MUST be split into chunks 76 characters in length as
specified by RFC 2045 section 6.8. By default, the
function chunk_split() uses a chunk length of 76 with
a trailing CRLF (\r\n). The 76 character requirement
does not include the carriage return and line feed */
$content = chunk_split(base64_encode($content));
/* Boundaries delimit multipart entities. As stated
in RFC 2046 section 5.1, the boundary MUST NOT occur
in any encapsulated part. Therefore, it should be
unique. As stated in the following section 5.1.1, a
boundary is defined as a line consisting of two hyphens
("--"), a parameter value, optional linear whitespace,
and a terminating CRLF. */
$prefix = "part_"; // This is an optional prefix
/* Generate a unique boundary parameter value with our
prefix using the uniqid() function. The second parameter
makes the parameter value more unique. */
$boundary = uniqid($prefix, true);
// headers
$headers = implode("\r\n", [
'From: [email protected]',
'Reply-To: [email protected]',
'X-Mailer: PHP/' . PHP_VERSION,
'MIME-Version: 1.0',
// boundary parameter required, must be enclosed by quotes
'Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="' . $boundary . '"',
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit",
"This is a MIME encoded message." // message for restricted transports
]);
// message and attachment
$message = implode("\r\n", [
"--" . $boundary, // header boundary delimiter line
'Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"',
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit",
$message,
"--" . $boundary, // content boundary delimiter line
'Content-Type: application/octet-stream; name="RenamedFile.pdf"',
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64",
"Content-Disposition: attachment",
$content,
"--" . $boundary . "--" // closing boundary delimiter line
]);
$result = mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers); // send the email
if ($result) {
// Success! Redirect to a thank you page. Use the
// POST/REDIRECT/GET pattern to prevent form resubmissions
// when a user refreshes the page.
header('Location: http://example.com/path/to/thank-you.php', true, 303);
exit;
}
else {
// Your mail was not sent. Check your logs to see if
// the reason was reported there for you.
}
Content-Transfer-Encodings
The available encodings are 7bit, 8bit, binary, quoted-printable, base64, ietf-token, and x-token. Of these encodings, when a header has a multipart Content-Type, the Content-Transfer-Encoding must not be any other value other than 7bit, 8bit, or binary as stated in RFC 2045, section 6.4.
Our example chooses the 7bit encoding, which represents US-ASCII characters, for the multipart header because, as noted in RFC 2045 section 6, some protocols support only this encoding. Data within the boundaries can then be encoded on a part-by-part basis (RFC 2046, section 5.1). This example does exactly this. The first part, which contains the text/plain message, is defined to be 8bit since it may be necessary to support additional characters. In this case, the Latin1 (iso-8859-1) character set is being used. The second part is the attachment and so it is defined as a base64-encoded application/octet-stream. Since base64 transforms arbitrary data into the 7bit range, it can be sent over restricted transports (RFC 2045, section 6.2).
