PHP Email Attachment Function
June 20th, 2008Read More email, php
Sending an email with PHP is pretty straight forwards. It's very useful for emailing reports generated from cron jobs etc.
Sometimes though you need your application to email an attachment.
After a load of messing around I have hacked together this email attachment PHP function.
PHP:
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function email_attachment($to_email, $email, $subject,$our_email_name, $our_email, $file_location, $default_filetype='application/zip'){
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$email = '<font face="arial">' . $email . '</font>';
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$fileatt = $file_location;
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$fileatttype = mime_content_type($file_location);
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}else{
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$fileatttype = $default_filetype;;
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}
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//prepare attachment
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//create mime boundary
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$mime_boundary = "==Multipart_Boundary_x{$semi_rand}x";
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//create email section
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$message = "This is a multi-part message in MIME format.\n\n" .
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"--{$mime_boundary}\n" .
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"Content-type: text/html; charset=us-ascii\n" .
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"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit\n\n" .
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$email . "\n\n";
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//create attachment section
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$message .= "--{$mime_boundary}\n" .
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"Content-Type: {$fileatttype};\n" .
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" name=\"{$fileattname}\"\n" .
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"Content-Disposition: attachment;\n" .
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" filename=\"{$fileattname}\"\n" .
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"Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64\n\n" .
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$data . "\n\n" .
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"--{$mime_boundary}--\n";
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//headers
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$domain = $exp[1];
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$headers = "From: $our_email_name<$our_email>" . "\n";
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$headers .= "Reply-To: $our_email"."\n";
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$headers .= "Return-Path: $our_email" . "\n"; // these two to set reply address
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$headers .= "X-Mailer: Edmonds Commerce Email Attachment Function"."\n"; // These two to help avoid spam-filters
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$headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0\n" .
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"Content-Type: multipart/mixed;\n" .
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" boundary=\"{$mime_boundary}\"";
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}
The PHP and Email Journey Continues 
For a fully featured email attachment class this is definitely worth checking out. If you just want a quick function though without any bells and whistles then you should find my function will do the trick.
September 6th, 2008 at 7:36 am
This works beautifully if 'allow_url_open' is switched on but most servers have it switched off for security reasons. I have been trying to replace the relevant bits of code with CURL but an struggling with opening the file and reading the data.
September 7th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
If you want to attach a remote file (accessed via a URL) then I would recommend downloading the file and storing it locally before trying to send it as an attachment using this function.
October 22nd, 2008 at 9:01 pm
Excellent work.
I've read quite a few out-dated tutorials that don't seem to work, but this one worked like a charm and was easy to understand/modify.
Thanks!
October 23rd, 2008 at 8:09 am
Thanks for the comment
if you have managed to improve the function at all it would be great if you could share it here.
December 9th, 2008 at 11:30 pm
Awesome! Thank you. I have just been through every script on page one of google for "php email atatchment" and none of them worked. Your code works perfectly though. Thanks!
December 10th, 2008 at 8:57 am
Glad you like
February 28th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
Finally someone who has a made a normal useable function.
It seems that nobody can do this in the php community.
April 21st, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Man, I have spent so much time trying to build a function which would send a html email with sound file wav attachment. Any other tutorial I googled out did not work.
This one worked right away!!!
Thank you, thank you, thank you. My day is brighter.
April 22nd, 2009 at 7:19 am
nice one
June 19th, 2009 at 9:55 pm
[...] of sending an email with attachment, the closest I could get to a working example I found at EdmondsCommerce.co.uk so primary credit goes to him. However I have made some minor modifications which I think make it a [...]
September 30th, 2009 at 8:24 pm
This is the best code I have found so far for this job, but still isnt working for me. I am trying to send a word doc, but its ending up as a zipped file of folders containing .xml files. Anyone know how to resolve this??
October 8th, 2009 at 7:16 am
This is an issue with the new docx format
see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338205.aspx
October 18th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
[...] Then, email the file with: PHP Email Attachment Function | Edmonds Commerce Blog [...]
January 31st, 2010 at 5:32 am
how to create browse and attach. I have a html form that provides option to attach and send email. But I want it to browse and attach multiple files.
How to?
Thanks.
Kash.