Question

When I send an email containing £ using PHP mail it appears in outlook/hotmail as £. In Gmail/thunderbird it’s fine.

Any idea how I can fix this?

Answer 1

The problem is, the client doesn’t know what encoding is used to encode the subject. Whatever your application sets in Content-Type header only applies to the body of the email, not the headers.

Usually this affects the following headers:

• Subject
• From
• To

In order to use different encodings your internationalized header lines should be MIME-encoded (as of RFC 2047), using one of the two methods: base64 (B) or modified quoted-printable (Q). The encoded subject usually looks like this:

Subject: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Pr=FCfung_f=FCr?= Entwerfen von einer MIME kopfzeile

This may look difficult, but there is one very handy helper function in PHP which does all the magic:

• iconv_mime_encode() – Composes a MIME header field

Alternatively you may look into discussion under:

• quoted_printable_encode() – Convert a 8 bit string to a quoted-printable string

Before using quoted_printable_encode() directly you neet to take into account that long lines need to be split at certain length and spaces need to be replaced with underscore “_”.