Question

I want to store angle brackets in a string in PHP because i want to eventually use mail() to send an HTML email out.

The following is the code that doesn’t seem to work.

while(...) {
   $msg .= "<img src=\"http://.../images/".$media['Path']."\"><br>";
   echo "message: ".$msg."<br>";
}

What I want is for $msg to contain a bunch of images (provided by $media[‘Path’]) that are separated by line breaks. Then $msg is passed into mail().

The echo confirms that no images are being sent. And, indeed, I receive no images in the email body. Why is this happening? How can I fix it?

Answer 1

There are two ways of embedding images in an email:

1. As external references: <img src="http://..."; and
2. Embedded in the email.

(1) is I guess what you’re trying to do. Many mail programs will (rightly) block such images as they are used by spammers to test email accounts for liveness.

It’s better to do (2). See PHP Email: Using Embedded Images in HTML Email. Basically you create a multi-part MIME email (so you can attach HTML and the images) and then reference them by cid instead of a true URL. These are far less suspicious to any mail program that receives them but obviously result in bigger emails (as the image might be sent 100,000 times instead of just sending a URL).