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I am having a problem sending emails when I add header information. However when I just remove the header parameter it works. What is wrong? Is it the code? Or some setting I need to change on the web server admin panel to say "Allow-Headers" or something? I am trying to send to hotmail in case this has any relavance in determining the problem. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Below Doesn't Send Email:

<?php

    $to      = '[email protected]';
    $subject = 'the subject';
    $message = 'hello';
    $headers = 'From: [email protected]';

    mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);

?>

Below Sends Email:

<?php

    $to = '[email protected]';
    $subject = 'the subject';
    $message = 'hello';
    $headers = 'From: [email protected]';

    mail($to, $subject, $message);

?>
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Try sending to Gmail and look it up in Spam. Hotmail has a tendency to discard emails that do not respect the RFC standards. – tntu Jun 16 at 15:32
Try adding \n in the end of $headers, but it's just a guess. – Petr R. Jun 16 at 15:32
@PetrR. Actually he should add \r\n but the server should also add it if it's not present. – tntu Jun 16 at 15:33
Adding \r\n to both subject and headers should theoretically work. However, you should consider adding a From:... in there (as part of your headers). Most email services/clients will most probably consider it as Spam, without it. – Fred Jun 16 at 15:37
1  
seriously, you should use a library like phpMailer for sending mail via php. The built-in mail() function has a lot of shortcomings. – Spudley Jun 16 at 15:42
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1 Answer

up vote 1 down vote

I use these headers in my php mailing function and it works well. Note: I also use a third party mail-routing service to avoid having my mails marked as coming from a spammy IP. You might want to look into that also.

$headers = 'From: '.$from.'@foo.net' . "\r\n" .
'Reply-To: '.$from.'@foo.net' . "\r\n" .
'X-Mailer: PHP/' . phpversion() . "\r\n" .
'MIME-Version: 1.0' . "\r\n" .
'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' . "\r\n";

I also use the optional fifth parameter to mail() to set the envelope address, e.g.:

$parameters = '-f '.$from.'@foo.net';

so the final call is:

mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers, $parameters);
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