Gotcha Of The Day: More PHP Malformed MIME Mail Issues

What is it with me and PHP MIME mail? The Mail_Mime package couldn't be easier to use, and has a straightforward tutorial that sums up everything you need to know.

Why then, today, when I wanted to attach a file to a mail message, were my messages consistently coming in malformed? Specifically, messages came in the following shape:

Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:26:12 -0500  « Headers start here
Message-Id: 
To: foo@bar.com
Subject: Foo needs some bar
MIME-Version: 1.0
From: bar@foo.com


--=_4817ceeae1593a82dcfe475697feb180 « Body starts here
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"

In other words, the body MIME content delimiter was considered as though it was part of the body.

My code was essentially right from the tutorial:

  $mime = new Mail_mime("\r\n");

  $send_to = 'foo@bar.com';
  $from    = 'bar@foo.com;
  $subject = "Need more Foo!";
  $message = "Please <b>send foo's</b> immediately";

  $mime->setHTMLBody($message);
  $mime->setTXTBody(strip_tags($message));
  $mime->addAttachment(file_get_contents($path), 
                       'application/octet-stream',"My Data.xls", false);
                         

  $headers = array('From' => $from,
                   'Subject' => $subject);

  $headers = $mime->headers($headers);
  $body    = $mime->get();

  $mail =& Mail::factory('mail');

What I eventually determined was the headers generated by $mime->headers(...) was missing critical ones like Content-Type.

But why?!

And then I realized one key difference between my code and the docs. I made the following switch:

  $mime = new Mail_mime("\r\n");

  $send_to = 'foo@bar.com';
  $from    = 'bar@foo.com;
  $subject = "Need more Foo!";
  $message = "Please <b>send foo's</b> immediately";

  $mime->setHTMLBody($message);
  $mime->setTXTBody(strip_tags($message));
  $mime->addAttachment(file_get_contents($path), 
                       'application/octet-stream',"My Data.xls", false);
                         

  $headers = array('From' => $from,
                   'Subject' => $subject);

  $body    = $mime->get();             // <- Must be first!
  $headers = $mime->headers($headers); // <- Must be second

  $mail =& Mail::factory('mail');

Sure enough, the call to $mime->get() has side effects, which make $mime->headers(...); properly function.

Man, that strikes me as poor style. Chalk this up to another vote for side effect free programming, will you?

OK, I think I've now had every issue I can have with PHP and MIME e-mail. It's time for a new gotcha.