Encoding problem in From email and name when sending email in PHP? - php

Question

What could be causing this encoding problem? Am I encoding the header information correctly or could this be caused somewhere else?
I found a similar problem here: Email from PHP has broken Subject header encoding but from what I'm reading I think I'm doing this right.
Basically sometimes our clients send emails written in french. It works but every once in a while we get some encoding issues and I'm wondering if I did the encoding wrong (I can't figure out).
$from = '=?UTF-8?B?'.base64_encode($email['from_name']).'?= <'.$email['from_email'].'>';
$to = '=?UTF-8?B?'.base64_encode($email['to_name']).'?= <'.$email['to_email'].'>';
$get_param = array(
'Content-Type' => 'text/plain;charset=utf-8',
'Content-Transfer-Encoding' => '8bit');
The code above is how I encode my header information and below is the sending:
$msg = $message_mime->get($get_param);
$headers = array (
'From' => $from,
'To' => $to,
'Reply-To' => $from,
'Subject' => utf8_decode($subject));
$headers = $message_mime->headers($headers);
$smtp = Mail::factory('smtp',
array ('host' => $smtp_settings['host'],
'auth' => true,
'username' => $smtp_settings['username'],
'password' => $smtp_settings['password']));
$mail = $smtp->send($to, $headers, $msg);
The problem is that the email they received was from:
Clientnamé de l'Ontario[=?UTF-8B?QXNzZW1ib(...)=?=]
Thanks for any help :)
Edit: The client's name basically uses the same characters as above. What I mean is that the email was supposed to be from "Clientnamé de l'Ontario"

Answer 1

Did you try replacing base64_encode with utf8_encode?
I'd try replacing:
$from = '=?UTF-8?B?'.base64_encode($email['from_name']).'?= <'.$email['from_email'].'>';
$to = '=?UTF-8?B?'.base64_encode($email['to_name']).'?= <'.$email['to_email'].'>';
with:
$email['from_name'] = utf8_encode($email['from_name']);
$email['to_name'] = utf8_encode($email['to_name']);
$from = $email['from_name'].' <' . $email['from_email'] . '>';
$to = $email['to_name']) . ' <' . $email['to_email'] . '>';
Might be worth a try...
Also detect_encoding could help (http://php.net/mb_detect_encoding/)?