Send an email attachment with PHP

To send email attachments you need to make use of MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) – a mechanism that allows email to go beyond a basic, limited character set. MIME has many uses but for the purposes of this tutorial we will send a multipart/mixed MIME email; this means we can send a text email and attach a PDF file to it (for information on attaching other file types please see the end of this tutorial).

Code listing

Here’s the complete code listing.

// Settings
$name        = "Name goes here";
$email       = "someome@anadress.com";
$to          = "$name <$email>";
$from        = "John-Smith ";
$subject     = "Here is your attachment";
$mainMessage = "Hi, here's the file.";
$fileatt     = "./test.pdf";
$fileatttype = "application/pdf";
$fileattname = "newname.pdf";
$headers = "From: $from";

// File
$file = fopen($fileatt, 'rb');
$data = fread($file, filesize($fileatt));
fclose($file);

// This attaches the file
$semi_rand     = md5(time());
$mime_boundary = "==Multipart_Boundary_x{$semi_rand}x";
$headers      .= "\nMIME-Version: 1.0\n" .
"Content-Type: multipart/mixed;\n" .
" boundary=\"{$mime_boundary}\"";
$message = "This is a multi-part message in MIME format.\n\n" .
"-{$mime_boundary}\n" .
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=\"iso-8859-1\n" .
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit\n\n" .
$mainMessage  . "\n\n";

$data = chunk_split(base64_encode($data));
$message .= "--{$mime_boundary}\n" .
"Content-Type: {$fileatttype};\n" .
" name=\"{$fileattname}\"\n" .
"Content-Disposition: attachment;\n" .
" filename=\"{$fileattname}\"\n" .
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64\n\n" .
$data . "\n\n" .
"-{$mime_boundary}-\n";

// Send the email
if(mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers)) {

    echo "The email was sent.";

}
else {

    echo "There was an error sending the mail.";

}

You can attach any kind of file you like – you need to make sure that change the $fileatttype variable to reflect the content type of the file you are attaching (e.g. image/gif for a GIF file).

I had problems with this code when I moved the post over to WordPress. Thanks a million to Mike Cooper for pointing this out—and helping me to fix it.

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