E-mails sent through php5+htmlMimeMail are being received with random characters replaced with =

Question

Hi all, currently using PHP5 with htmlMimeMail 5 (http://www.phpguru.org/static/mime.mail.html) to send HTML e-mail communications. Have been having issues with a number of recipients seeing random characters replaced with equals signs e.g.:

"Good mor=ing. Our school is sending our newsletter= and information through a company called..."

Have set e-mail text, HTML, and header encoding to UTF-8. The template files loaded by PHP for the e-mail (just include()'d text/HTML with a few php tags in them) are both encoded in UTF-8.

The interesting thing is that I can't duplicate the problem on any of my e-mail clients, and can't find any information by searching yahoo/googlies that would point me at the problem!!

Answer 1

Try sending with 8-bit encoding:

$message->setTextEncoding(new EightBitEncoding());
$message->setHTMLEncoding(new EightBitEncoding());

Answer 2

I suspect your problem is related to older versions of Exchange. Equal signs at end of line:

It may not be the quoted printable thing with high/low order characters or the encoding. Also, elsewhere on that page it says:

NOTE: A bug ("feature"?) in Exchange may cause line feeds to be replaced with equal signs when rich text mail is disabled.

Answer 3

I had a similar issue, but mine was a little different. Since I stumbled upon this thread looking for the answer and it helped me find it, I thought I may as well post this related answer here.

In my case special characters were getting messed up in emails even through the actual mb_detect_encoding of the text strings being sent was "UTF-8" and if I echoed them they looked fine.

So I had to us the function

$message->setTextCharset('UTF-8')

and

$message->setHTMLCharset('UTF-8')