Question

I am using the PHPMailer library integrated in Joomla for an email component in Joomla. It does work quite well, however I am having an issue with users running the script with 1and1 mail servers. They can get errors like that:

2012-06-14 18:20:34 u65913791 1x1et0-1RocCH2xzU-00qzkq EE transaction error after sending of mail text: msmtp.kundenserver.de[172.19.35.7] 500 Line limit exceeded

Another example from a different user:

SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:
host mx00.1and1.co.uk [212.227.15.134]: 500 Line limit exceeded

The line limit is not about how many lines but how many characters are actually used in a single line which 1and1 limits to 10240 characters (support answer) – which is actually 10 times more than required in RFC 2822.

I assume the issue is caused by using “wrong” line seperators when the emails is submitted so that the whole email reaches the email server as a single line. I guess that I need to make sure to insert line breaks in my script as PHPMailer fails do so.

Currently I am just receiving the HTML content from a WYSIWYG-editor and put into the PHPMailer object:

// snip, $mail2send is the JMail instance, which inherits PHPMailer
$mail2send->setSubject($mail->subject);
$mail2send->IsHTML(true);
$mail2send->setBody($mail->body);   
// snip

How can I insert the appropiate line breaks?

Answer 1

After further investigation the error could be identified: after several replies in an email thread an embedded HTML message had no lines break anymore. I guess an email client involved in the conversation did this.

To overcome this problem I do a HTML-tag-safe wrapping using the following function:

/* HTML-tag-safe wordwrap
 * from http://php.net/manual/de/function.wordwrap.php
 * by nbenitezl[arroba]gmail[dot]com
 */
function htmlwrap(&$str, $maxLength=76, $char="\r\n"){
    $count = 0;
    $newStr = '';
    $openTag = false;
    $lenstr = strlen($str);
    for($i=0; $i<$lenstr; $i++){
        $newStr .= $str{$i};
        if($str{$i} == '<'){
            $openTag = true;
            continue;
        }
        if(($openTag) && ($str{$i} == '>')){
            $openTag = false;
            continue;
        }
        if(!$openTag){
            if($str{$i} == ' '){
                if ($count == 0) {
                    $newStr = substr($newStr,0, -1);
                    continue;
                } else {
                    $lastspace = $count + 1;
                }
            }
            $count++;
            if($count==$maxLength){
                if ($str{$i+1} != ' ' && $lastspace && ($lastspace < $count)) {
                    $tmp = ($count - $lastspace)* -1;
                    $newStr = substr($newStr,0, $tmp) . $char . substr($newStr,$tmp);
                    $count = $tmp * -1;
                } else {
                    $newStr .= $char;
                    $count = 0;
                }
                $lastspace = 0;
            }
        } 
    }

    return $newStr;
}