Hi, I've encountered difficulties utilising the mail() function properly under a NIX environments while conforming to RFC 2822. There two specific issues, one is a code problem the other a documentation issue they are intertwined so I thought best run it by here and see that people understand the issue before I head to the bug tracker.
As you are no doubt aware mail() operates using the system sendmail interface under NIX environments, and under Windows it either utilises a sendmail binary or more commonly the SMTP feature. The problem stems from confusion and inappropriate application of the SMTP standards to the sendmail interface. Under a NIX environment the sendmail interface operates taking an e-mail message constructed using the system line ending, LF. I've confirmed this applies to the Postfix sendmail interface [1], and could ask other vendors. Under Windows either the sendmail binary or SMTP is utilised. The correct line endings for SMTP are certainly CR-LF, sendmail I guess could be either. The documentation mentions to use CR-LF as the line endings for the $additional_headers parameters whilst the function implementation utilises LFs [2] which results in a mix of line endings, which is worse than incorrect line endings. There is a 7 year old bug open about this inconsistency [3] and as of yet nobody has fixed it, I hope this can be rectified. The second issue I have is quite a show stopper with regards to properly formatted emails under the NIX environment; email headers maybe no longer than 998 characters but the advised cut off is 78, a long header should be folded over two lines with some white space indentation. [4] As the To and Subject headers are populated from the function arguments of the same name they pass through additional checks over the other headers. The problem arises with the SKIP_LONG_HEADER_SEP macro [5] which only skips over the SMTP standard of CR-LF-WSP and not LF-WSP required for NIX sendmail as a consequence the LF is replace with a space effectively unfolding the folded line. It is therefore impossible to correctly create an email using mail() with a large number of recipients or a long subject, the effective limit of text shrinks when encoding is used for non ASCII characters as well. Can anyone provide me with any insight? Regards, Chris [1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.mail.postfix.user/200784 [2] http://svn.php.net/viewvc/php/php-src/branches/PHP_5_3/ext/standard/mail.c?view=markup#l312 [3] http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=15841 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2822#section-2.2.3 [4] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2822#section-2.2.3 [5] http://svn.php.net/viewvc/php/php-src/branches/PHP_5_3/ext/standard/mail.c?view=markup#l56 -- Chris Smith -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
