In a WordPress plugin I am developing, I am using Pear’s mail_mime to generate an HTML email and send it with an attachment. This worked fine for me during testing with my gmail account. However once I started using the plugin to send emails to others, Outlook users were getting a garbled mess. Outlook could not properly understand the generated multipart/mixed message and was showing the raw text. It took a bit of digging to discover the solution, but the root of the issue goes back to an age-old C.S. problem.
Windows uses ‘rn’ to define a line break, while Unix-like systems use ‘n’ to define a line break. Gmail doesn’t care which kind of line break you use, but Outlook requires line breaks to be in the ‘rn’ format.
Mail_mime allows you to pass the default for line breaks as a constructor argument. However, this didn’t work correctly for me. The Mail_mime code uses the End-Of-Line constant (PHP_EOL) and passing the EOL value in was not enough to change the value in all places.
What I had to do to finally get Outlook emails to display correctly was to first define the PHP_EOL constant and then pass it in as well.
// define the PHP_EOL constant
if (!defined('PHP_EOL')) define ('PHP_EOL',"rn");
// pass in the value on create
$mime = new Mail_mime(PHP_EOL);
I had to define the constant AND pass in the value to catch all the places the linebreak characters were used. This seems like a bug in Mail_mime.
I used the comments on this bug report to solve this issue. Unfortunately since this work-around was discovered, the maintainers don’t seem willing to fix this issue.
Pirate Gaspard 