Is there an alternative method for sending email attachments in php?

Question

I have some code in a php file that sends an attachment (an excel file that was generated by the same php script) by email.

Every tested client - IOS (iphone 3gs, 4, 4s, ipad, ipad2), Android (Icecream Sandwich), Blackberry, Microsoft Outlook 2007 (on XP) reads the email and the attachment absolutely fine, but the actual person we send the email to gets a message with lots of characters and no attachment. It's as if his email server (he's on a domain so not a known email service like hotmail or gmail) is failing to interpret the sent bytes and see that some of it is an attachment.

The snippet of code I use is as follows...

function email($recipients,$filename,$subject,$cc,$bcc){

    $to = $recipients;
    $subject = "EWS-".$subject;
    $random_hash = md5(date('r', time()));



    if($cc <> ""){
        $header_cc = "\r\nCc: ".$cc;

    }else{
        $header_cc = "";
    }

    if($bcc <> ""){
        $header_bcc = "\r\nBcc: ".$bcc;

    }else{
        $header_bcc = "";
    }


    $headers = "From: info@ourcompany.com\r\nReply-To: info@ourcompany.com". $header_cc . $header_bcc;
    $headers .= "\r\nContent-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=\"PHP-mixed-".$random_hash."\"";
    $attachment = chunk_split(base64_encode(file_get_contents($filename)));
    ob_start(); 

    ?>

--PHP-mixed-<?php echo $random_hash; ?> 
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="PHP-alt-<?php echo $random_hash; ?>"

--PHP-alt-<?php echo $random_hash; ?> 
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit


--PHP-alt-<?php echo $random_hash; ?> 
Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit


--PHP-alt-<?php echo $random_hash; ?>--

--PHP-mixed-<?php echo $random_hash; ?> 
Content-Type: application/excel; name="<?php echo $filename ?>"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 
Content-Disposition: attachment 

<?php echo $attachment; ?>

--PHP-mixed-<?php echo $random_hash; ?>--

    <?php

    $message = ob_get_clean();
    $mail_sent = @mail( $to, $subject, $message, $headers );
    return $mail_sent ? "Mail sent" : "Mail failed"; 

}

The customer gets the email like this (it was forwaded back to us so I'm viewing it in Outlook)...

• Is it the disclaimer that messes it up? (If so how do my tests work? some of which are using external email addresses like @me.com @gmail.com @manx.net)

• Is there something wrong with the code that might cause this?

• Is there an alternative way to send emails using PHP that is more likely to work?

Answer 1

There are lots of class files that have this functionality built in why re-create the wheel?

• PHPMailer
• SwiftMailer