How to send HTML emails where the signature doesn't get clipped? - php

Question

I am trying to send emails through PHP and, while the messages get delivered, I'm having a small issue. In Gmail, and probably other email clients, the last line of the message (the signature) is getting clipped. By "clipped" I mean that the last line is hidden, with a sort of button that can be clicked to unhide the last line.
Is there some way to stop this from happening? This is my first time trying to send HTML emails through PHP, so I thought maybe there's some kind of syntax I don't know about.
I'm basically just using the phpmailer example code:
require_once('../class.phpmailer.php');
//include("class.smtp.php"); // optional, gets called from within class.phpmailer.php if not already loaded
$mail = new PHPMailer(true); // the true param means it will throw exceptions on errors, which we need to catch
$mail->IsSMTP(); // telling the class to use SMTP
try {
$mail->Host = "mail.yourdomain.com"; // SMTP server
$mail->SMTPDebug = 2; // enables SMTP debug information (for testing)
$mail->SMTPAuth = true; // enable SMTP authentication
$mail->SMTPSecure = "tls"; // sets the prefix to the servier
$mail->Host = "smtp.gmail.com"; // sets GMAIL as the SMTP server
$mail->Port = 587; // set the SMTP port for the GMAIL server
$mail->Username = "yourusername#gmail.com"; // GMAIL username
$mail->Password = "yourpassword"; // GMAIL password
$mail->AddReplyTo('name#yourdomain.com', 'First Last');
$mail->AddAddress('whoto#otherdomain.com', 'John Doe');
$mail->SetFrom('name#yourdomain.com', 'First Last');
$mail->AddReplyTo('name#yourdomain.com', 'First Last');
$mail->Subject = 'PHPMailer Test Subject via mail(), advanced';
$mail->AltBody = 'To view the message, please use an HTML compatible email viewer!'; // optional - MsgHTML will create an alternate automatically
$mail->MsgHTML(file_get_contents('contents.html'));
$mail->AddAttachment('images/phpmailer.gif'); // attachment
$mail->AddAttachment('images/phpmailer_mini.gif'); // attachment
$mail->Send();
echo "Message Sent OK<p></p>\n";
} catch (phpmailerException $e) {
echo $e->errorMessage(); //Pretty error messages from PHPMailer
} catch (Exception $e) {
echo $e->getMessage(); //Boring error messages from anything else!
}
Appreciate your advice.

Answer 1

No, there isn't really. The "clipping" as you refer to it is done by GMail (or whatever client) based on its own analysis of the content of the email - if something looks like a signature/quoted reply, it'll collapse it.
It has nothing to do with how you're sending the email.

Answer 2

Solution often repeated on SO is to eliminate any sort of "repetition" so people add unique timestamps in the footer, invisible images etc.
In my case Gmail exhibited a bug and would display this message because the first name was appearing inside the subject line and inside the body of the email.
And it wasn't even trimming the message, it was displaying the full message, but saying that it's trimmed.
Solution is to try to manually cut out chunks of the email and keep sending yourself tests until you stop seeing the notice and then work your way out from there.