emails sent with php mail don't show up correctly in outlook

Question

I'm working on a site that was recently moved. After the move all the scripts that use the php mail() function AND have MIME-Version: and Content-type in the header fail to display correctly. They show up like this

Delivered-To: [email protected] Received: by 10.114.121.18 with SMTP id t17cs128223wac;
        Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:52:35 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.231.48.150 with SMTP id s22mr755195ibfdge.22.1258660355109;
        Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:52:35 -0800 (PST) Return-Path: <[email protected]> Received: from u15366254.onlinehome-server.com (u15366254.onlinehome-server.com [74.208.194.179])
        by mx.google.com with ESMTP id 16si2425376iwn.129.2009.11.19.11.52.34;
        Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:52:34 -0800 (PST) Received-SPF: pass (google.com: best guess record for domain of [email protected] designates 74.208.194.179 as permitted sender) client-ip=74.208.194.179; Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=pass (google.com: best guess record for domain of [email protected] designates 74.208.194.179 as permitted sender) [email protected] Received: (qmail 8341 invoked by uid 48); 19 Nov 2009 08:55:35 -0500 Date: 19 Nov 2009 08:55:35 -0500 
Message-ID: <[email protected]> 
To: [email protected] 
Subject: Retailer Application MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 
From: [email protected]

In addition the html in the message shows up raw.

When I use the exact same script to send an email on another server it works as expected. Also the email scripts on the site that use Swift mail work fine.

I could just modify them to use swift but there are many scripts that would have to be edited.

I'm using php 5.1.6.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I think your problem is related with \n and QMAIL, the mail function documentation state this.

Note: If messages are not received, try using a LF (\n) only. Some poor quality Unix mail transfer agents replace LF by CRLF automatically (which leads to doubling CR if CRLF is used). This should be a last resort, as it does not comply with » RFC 2822.

so you if you header are separated by \r\n you could probably replace those by single \n.

This bug report also provide a solution using a script.