Sending UTF-8 Emails

When sending emails, it's crucial to handle character encoding properly to avoid garbled characters. One common issue is the encoding of non-English characters, such as those used in various languages.

In the provided scenario, the sender faced the problem of non-English characters appearing as unreadable text after sending an email. Despite adding Content-Type and Charset headers, the issue persists.

To rectify this, the key is to include the header Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 in the message body. This header informs email clients that the message is in HTML format and uses the UTF-8 character encoding, enabling them to display all characters correctly.

With the native mail() function, this header can be specified as the fourth parameter:

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

Where $headers is a string containing the Content-Type header.

In the case of using the PEAR Mail::factory() library:

$smtp = Mail::factory('smtp', $params);

$mail = $smtp->send($to, $headers, $body);

Here, $headers is an array containing the Content-Type header.

By adding the appropriate Content-Type header, the email will be sent with correct character encoding, ensuring that non-English characters are displayed properly in the recipient's mail client.