Processing a HTML email template file and php - php

Question

I created a html email welcome.tpl what php mail method do I have to use in order to send out that file as the body of the message? prior to this I've been using and including the html and text in variables
$text_content.= "\r\n";
$text_content.= "--------------------------------\r\n";
$html_content.= "</body></html>";
$mime_boundary = 'Multipart_Boundary_x'.md5(time()).'x';
$headers = "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
$headers.= "Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=\"$mime_boundary\"\r\n";
$headers.= "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit\r\n";
$body = "--$mime_boundary\n";
$body.= "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=\"charset=us-ascii\"\n";
$body.= "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit\n\n";
$body.= $text_content;
$body.= "\n\n";
$body.= "--$mime_boundary\n";
$body.= "Content-Type: text/html; charset=\"UTF-8\"\n";
$body.= "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit\n\n";
$body.= $html_content;
$body.= "\n\n";
$body.= "--$mime_boundary--\n";
$headers.= 'From: So <support#sos.com>' . "\r\n";
$headers.= "X-Sender-IP: $_SERVER[SERVER_ADDR]\r\n";
$headers.= 'Date: '.date('n/d/Y g:i A')."\r\n";
$headers.= 'Reply-To: So <support#sos.com>' . "\r\n";
mail($en['email'], $subject, $body, $headers);
should i be using something like $body = file_get_contents(); and is mail(); the best method?

Answer 1

I would suggest the following:
You are using a .tpl extension on your template, so I'm assuming you are running Smarty as a template engine?
If not, then you can simply use file_get_contents();
$template = file_get_contents('template.tpl');
$template = str_replace('{name}', 'Sean Nieuwoudt', $template);
$template = str_replace('{email}', 'me#me.com', $template);
...
etc
The simply use the mail() function to send off the email.
The alternative and somewhat more reliable way would be to use something like Postmarkapp to send emails. It guarantee's delivery where as mail() might end up in the receivers spam folder (especially if running on a shared hosting environment).
With postmark, you can do something like this:
Mail_Postmark::compose()
->addTo('jane#smith.com', 'Jane Smith')
->subject('Subject')
->messagePlain($template)
->send();
Take a look at some of the freely available PHP-Postmark classes http://developer.postmarkapp.com/developer-libs.html#php-5

Answer 2

Use the following code :
// Always set content-type when sending HTML email
$headers = "MIME-Version: 1.0" . "\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-type:text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" . "\r\n";
and you can also include that
// More headers
$headers .= 'From: <webmaster#example.com>' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'Cc: myboss#example.com' . "\r\n";
and use
$body = file_get_contents();
and send the mail by mail function:
mail($en['email'], $subject, $body, $headers);