Question

I want to send an e-mail using the mail-function in PHP. The “FROM”-part of the header should contain a name with a space

 name with space <[e-mail]>

Unfortunately, some mail clients cannot handle the spaces. Thats why e.g. Thunderbird adds quotes to the name.

 "name with space" <[e-mail]>

That works fine, until you add special characters like ÄÖÜ, since they need to be encoded. The follwing would not work:

 "name with ÄÖÜ and space" <[e-mail]>

Thats why I tried the function mb_encode_mimeheader

echo mb_encode_mimeheader("name with"." ÄÖÜ"." and space", "ISO-8859-1", "Q");
# result:
# name with =?ISO-8859-1?Q?=C3=84=C3=96=C3=9C=20and=20space?=

That still does not work, since before the first occurence of the special characters, the spaces are still in the string. the correct result schould be:

=?ISO-8859-1?Q?name=20with=20=C3=84=C3=96=C3=9C=20and=20space?=

Is there a function in PHP that can handle this? or should I use a mixture of quotes and ´mb_encode_mimeheader´? Or is there a different way to handle spaces in mailheaders? To be honest, I did not understand the meaning of the different whitespaces mentioned in the RFC822.

Answer 1

You don’t need quotes. RFC2047-encoding (i.e. mb_encode) handles spaces as well.

(Although for the record, just plain spaces are completely unproblematic; they are not the reason some clients use quoting, which is often completely redundant anyway. So the result with the spaces is actually not incorrect at all.)