php mail() function, headers issue, can not send an email

Question

I know this is really common issue, but I have problem with headers. This function send email only when I send mail with $header2. In other cases I get fail echo. Does not working with $headers.

I don't know why it is happening, also it doesn't work with php.net default headers below:

$headers = 'From: [email protected]' . "\r\n" .
'Reply-To: [email protected]' . "\r\n" .
'X-Mailer: PHP/' . phpversion();

Complete function:

function sendMail() {

$to = "[email protected]";
$subject = "This is subject";

$message = "<b>This is HTML message.</b>";
$message .= "<h1>This is headline.</h1>";

$headers  = 'MIME-Version: 1.0' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' . "\r\n";

// Additional headers
$headers .= 'To: Mary <[email protected]>, Kelly <[email protected]>' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'From: Birthday Reminder <[email protected]>' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'Cc: [email protected]' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'Bcc: [email protected]' . "\r\n";

$header2 = "From:[email protected] \r\n";
$header2 = "Cc:[email protected] \r\n";
$header2 .= "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
$header2 .= "Content-type: text/html\r\n";

$retval = mail ($to, $subject, $message, $headers);

if( $retval == true ) {
    echo "Message sent successfully...";
}else {
    echo "Message could not be sent...";
}
}

Answer 1

Firstly, just get rid of this entire code block since there is no reference to your usage of the $headers2 variable. Do go over my answer in its entirety.

$header2 = "From:[email protected] \r\n";
$header2 = "Cc:[email protected] \r\n";
//       ^ BROKEN concatenate
$header2 .= "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
$header2 .= "Content-type: text/html\r\n";

PHP is going over your entire code, regardless. And it contains a broken concatenate.

However, it's unclear as to what you want to do here and have obviously taken examples from the manual on mail() http://php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php then just blindly adding stuff in there.

Sidenote: The To: is already pre-determined as to where it should be sent to, so the use of To: in the headers isn't required.

function sendMail() {

$to = "[email protected]";
$subject = "This is subject";

$message = "<b>This is HTML message.</b>";
$message .= "<h1>This is headline.</h1>";

$headers  = 'MIME-Version: 1.0' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' . "\r\n";

// Additional headers
$headers .= "From:[email protected] \r\n";
$headers .= "Cc:[email protected] \r\n";

$retval = mail ($to, $subject, $message, $headers);

if( $retval == true ) {
    echo "Message sent successfully...";
}else {
    echo "Message could not be sent...";
}
}

and if the goal here is to send 2 seperate mails, then you will need to use 2 seperate mail() functions and 2 different header variables.

Something to which you can consult, as per an answer I once gave for another question:

• https://stackoverflow.com/a/18382062/1415724

---

Add error reporting to the top of your file(s) which will help find errors.

<?php 
error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('display_errors', 1);

// Then the rest of your code

Sidenote: Displaying errors should only be done in staging, and never production.

Answer 2

Please stop using the php mail() function! My advice will be to use PHPMailer and sending the emails via SMTP.

Here is a small code snippet using PHPmailer:

<?php
require 'PHPMailerAutoload.php';

$mail = new PHPMailer;

//$mail->SMTPDebug = 3;                               // Enable verbose debug output

$mail->isSMTP();                                      // Set mailer to use SMTP
$mail->Host = 'smtpserver.com';  // Specify main SMTP server. If you dont have one us GMAL or mandrill
$mail->SMTPAuth = true;                               // Enable SMTP authentication
$mail->Username = '[email protected]';                 // SMTP username
$mail->Password = 'pass';                           // SMTP password
$mail->SMTPSecure = 'tls';                            // Enable TLS encryption, `ssl` also accepted
$mail->Port = 587;                                    // TCP port to connect to

$mail->setFrom('[email protected]', 'Mailer');
$mail->addAddress('[email protected]', 'Joe User');     // Add a recipient
$mail->addAddress('[email protected]');               // Name is optional
$mail->addReplyTo('[email protected]', 'Information');
$mail->addCC('[email protected]');
$mail->addBCC('[email protected]');

$mail->addAttachment('/var/tmp/file.tar.gz');         // Add attachments
$mail->addAttachment('/tmp/image.jpg', 'new.jpg');    // Optional name
$mail->isHTML(true);                                  // Set email format to HTML

$mail->Subject = 'Here is the subject';
$mail->Body    = 'This is the HTML message body <b>in bold!</b>';
$mail->AltBody = 'This is the body in plain text for non-HTML mail clients';

if(!$mail->send()) {
    echo 'Message could not be sent.';
    echo 'Mailer Error: ' . $mail->ErrorInfo;
} else {
    echo 'Message has been sent';
}