PHPMailer doesn't show HTML - php

Question

I am building a bulk email tool to address a list of our clients regarding some upcoming migrations. Our current mass mail tool doesn't quite cut it in this particular case, where I have opted to just build one instead.
I am using TinyMCE to provide an editor for the email message body and passing this along to PHPMailer to send out. Everything is working great except the html is not displayed properly when viewed in a client such as Outlook. I have made absolutely sure $mail->isHTML(true) is set so I am at a loss now.
I echo out the value of $message in the bulk_mail_sender() function and its correct. If I paste this string as $mail->Body it works. If I have $message set as $mail->Body however, it turns into all sorts of strange characters.
Message Source:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"><p>Hi there,</p>
<p>Â </p>
<p>What is up foo</p>
Code:
function bulk_mail_sender($vars, $emails, $subject, $message)
{
foreach ($emails as $email)
{
$mail = new PHPMailer;
$mail->isSMTP(); // Set mailer to use SMTP
$mail->SMTPAuth = true; // Enable SMTP authentication
$mail->Host = $vars['opt_host']; // Specify main SMTP Server
$mail->Port = $vars['opt_port']; // TCP port
$mail->Username = $vars['opt_user']; // SMTP Username
$mail->Password = $vars['opt_pass']; // SMTP Password
$mail->SMTPSecure = $vars['opt_type']; // Enable TLS / SSL encryption
$mail->setFrom($vars['opt_sender_email'], $vars['opt_sender_name']);
$mail->addAddress($email);
$mail->addReplyTo($vars['opt_sender_email'], $vars['opt_sender_name']);
$mail->isHTML(true);
$mail->Subject = $subject;
$mail->Body = $message;
if(!$mail->send())
{
echo 'Message failed to send to ' . $email;
echo 'Mailer Error: ' . $mail->ErrorInfo . '</br></br>';
}
else
{
echo 'Message has been sent to ' . $email . '</br>';
}
}
}
function bulk_mail_output($vars)
{
if (!empty($_POST))
{
$subject = $_POST['subject'];
$message = $_POST['message'];
$emails = $_POST['emails'];
$emails = explode(PHP_EOL, $emails);
bulk_mail_sender($vars, $emails, $subject, $message);
}
else
{
echo '<form method="POST" action="">';
echo 'Subject: <input type="text" name="subject" id="subject"></br></br>';
echo '<textarea rows="10" cols="100" name="message" id="message"></textarea></br></br>';
echo '<h3>Email Addresses</h3>';
echo '<textarea rows="10" cols="100" name="emails" id="emails"></textarea></br></br>';
echo '<input type="submit" value="Submit">';
echo '</form>';
echo '<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="../includes/jscript/tiny_mce/tiny_mce.js"></script>
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
tinyMCE.init({
mode: "exact",
elements: "message",
theme: "advanced",
entity_encoding: "raw",
convert_urls: false,
relative_urls: false,
plugins: "style,table,advlink,inlinepopups,media,searchreplace,contextmenu,paste,directionality,visualchars,xhtmlxtras",
theme_advanced_buttons1: "cut,copy,paste,pastetext,|,bold,italic,underline,strikethrough,|,justifyleft,justifycenter,justifyright,justifyfull,|,formatselect,fontselect,fontsizeselect,|,search,replace",
theme_advanced_buttons2: "bullist,numlist,|,outdent,indent,blockquote,|,undo,redo,|,link,unlink,anchor,image,|,forecolor,backcolor,|,hr,removeformat,visualaid,|,sub,sup,|,charmap,media,|,ltr,rtl,cleanup,code,help",
theme_advanced_buttons3: "", // tablecontrols
theme_advanced_toolbar_location: "top",
theme_advanced_toolbar_align: "left",
theme_advanced_statusbar_location: "bottom",
theme_advanced_resizing: true
});
function toggleEditor(id)
{
if (!tinyMCE.get(id))
tinyMCE.execCommand(\'mceAddControl\', false, id);
else
tinyMCE.execCommand(\'mceRemoveControl\', false, id);
}
</script>';
}
}

Answer 1

While I couldn't ever find a way to fix this within TinyMCE, the workaround used was to just wrap my $message variable in the html_entity_decode function when setting it to the mail body. I would have preferred to pass the data from TinyMCE properly the first time, however the entity encoding cannot be fully disabled for some reason.
$mail = new PHPMailer;
$mail->CharSet = "UTF-8";
$mail->isSMTP(); // Set mailer to use SMTP
$mail->SMTPAuth = true; // Enable SMTP authentication
$mail->Host = $vars['opt_host']; // Specify main SMTP Server
$mail->Port = $vars['opt_port']; // TCP port
$mail->Username = $vars['opt_user']; // SMTP Username
$mail->Password = $vars['opt_pass']; // SMTP Password
$mail->SMTPSecure = $vars['opt_type']; // Enable TLS / SSL encryption
$mail->setFrom($vars['opt_sender_email'], $vars['opt_sender_name']);
$mail->addReplyTo($vars['opt_sender_email'], $vars['opt_sender_name']);
$mail->addAddress($email);
$mail->isHTML(true);
$mail->Subject = $subject;
$mail->Body = html_entity_decode($message);
if(!$mail->send())
{
echo 'Message failed to send to ' . $email;
echo 'Mailer Error: ' . $mail->ErrorInfo . '</br></br>';
}
else
{
echo 'Message has been sent to ' . $email . '</br>';
}