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Outlook 2007 receives html mail as source with headers, others MUAs work fine. Why?

Answer 1

+1 A:

If the message is in HTML you need to identify it as such:

$header .= "Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\r\n";

John Conde 2010-01-27 18:31:27

Argh! copied and pasted from the wrong version (I was editing the code to plaintext to get by). It did say 'text/html' in the real code. I corrected the question, thank you.

Adriano Varoli Piazza 2010-01-27 18:34:46

Answer 2

A:

There are lots of problems with HTML email in Outlook 2007.
http://www.molly.com/2007/01/18/what-happened-with-html-and-css-in-outlook-2007/

http://fixoutlook.org/

http://www.developertutorials.com/tutorials/html/microsoft-complicates-html-emails-with-outlook-2007-070130/page1.html

and so on.

echo 2010-01-27 18:45:06

Ok, but those problems are (as far as I read) of the 'my layout is not showing correctly' kind, not of the 'crap, the headers of the message are displayed and I get raw html' kind. Or am I wrong? The layout for the message in question has nothing complicated.

Adriano Varoli Piazza 2010-01-27 18:47:19

I imagine it's related. I fought with this a few years back and gave up. HTML email is evil anyway, and outlook is trying its best to deal with the evils of HTML email by fiddling with your content.

echo 2010-01-27 18:55:33

Oh, sure. I'm phoning the customer right now and telling her 'you know what? HTML email is evil. Justin said so'.

Adriano Varoli Piazza 2010-01-27 19:06:43

I feel your frustration. It's the truth though....

echo 2010-01-27 20:10:06

I'm not frustrated. I'm curious. I want to know why. You're the one that said 'I gave up a few years back'. And your 'html email is evil' point is ridiculous. Leave the term to something truly worthy of it. Like Cobol.

Adriano Varoli Piazza 2010-01-27 20:23:20

http://www.asciiribbon.org/

echo 2010-01-27 20:54:55

Look, I'm not trying to get into an argument here, I'm just stating what I believe to be true. I'm not the one who decided HTML email is a bad idea. There's information all over the web that says the same thing, if you care to do a bit of googling. It's one of those user-friendly "features" that turned out to be a huge security nightmare, and there are reasons that MS Outlook doesn't just display HTML email as-is.

echo 2010-01-27 22:00:14

please, reread the question and my first comment to this answer.

Adriano Varoli Piazza 2010-03-08 00:37:27

Outlook using MS Word to render HTML formatted email won't be the problem here. The problem here is extracting the message body from the email, which has nothing to do with what happens to the body afterwards.

David Dorward 2010-03-11 08:58:57

Answer 3

+1 A:

I have always had better luck with MIME encoded HTML mails. Even if there is just one part, I typically use multipart/mixed and explicitly set the content type (text/html). I'm not very familiar with PHP, but the PEAR::Mail_Mime package looks like a candidate.

http://pear.php.net/package/Mail_Mime

Outlook shouldn't have a problem handling it. (emphisis on shouldn't).

dpb 2010-03-10 05:24:44

Answer 4

+1 A:

I have had trouble with Exchange (not just Outlook) and CRLF in headers with similar results. Basically, we were sending mails (using PHP on Debian with Postfix) with CRLF-separated headers, which would get mangled in Exchange upon arrival. When I changed those \r\n to simply \n, the problem was gone. ("RFCs be damned!", eh?)

YMMV, obviously, since it is not clear whether your other mail clients connect to the same server as Outlook, or use separate servers altogether.

janmoesen 2010-03-11 07:53:42

Answer 5

+1 A:

Have you tried sending multipart email, when doing this we never had issues with outlook 2k3 and 2k7 (excepts poor HTML rendering)

<?php
$header = "From: Sender <[email protected]>\r\n";
$header .= "Reply-to: Sender <[email protected]>\r\n";
$header .= "X-Mailer: Our Php\r\n";

$boundary = "==String_Boundary_x" .md5(time()). "x\r\n";
$boundary2 = "==String_Boundary2_y" .md5(time()). "y\r\n";

$header .= "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
$header .= "Content-Type: multipart/related;\r\n";
$header .= " type="multipart/alternative";\r\n";
$header .= " boundary="$boundary";\r\n";

$message = "If you read this, your email client doesn't support MIME\r\n";

$message .= "--$boundary\r\n";
$message .= "Content-Type: multipart/alternative;\r\n";
$message .= " boundary="$boundary2";\r\n";

$message .= "--$boundary2\r\n";
$message .= "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=\"iso-8859-1\"\r\n";
$message .= "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit\r\n";
$message .= "Alternative message in plain text format.\r\n";

$message .= "--$boundary2\r\n";
$message .= "Content-Type: text/html; charset=\"iso-8859-1\"\r\n";
$message .= "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit\r\n";
$message .= "<html><body><p>HTML formatted message</p></body></html>";

You can replace bondaries with wathever you want, but they must be unique.

For more powerful and flexible email sending in php I suggest to use SwiftMailer

EDIT : as Outlook 2007 has a really dumb HTML renderer, you can also try fixing your markup, there is a never opened in your exemple, dunno if it's the real mail or a typo in question.

Benoit 2010-03-11 08:54:23

yes, the font tag is a typo, thanks.

Adriano Varoli Piazza 2010-03-11 13:20:31

Thank you. This was clear and helpful.

Adriano Varoli Piazza 2010-03-13 14:22:12

glad it helped you

Benoit 2010-03-16 12:21:59

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Outlook 2007 receives html mail as source with headers, others MUAs work fine. Why?

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