PHPMailer character encoding issues - php

Question

I try to use PHPMailer to send registration, activation. etc mail to users:
require("class.phpmailer.php");
$mail -> charSet = "UTF-8";
$mail = new PHPMailer();
$mail->IsSMTP();
$mail->Host = "smtp.mydomain.org";
$mail->From = "name#mydomain.org";
$mail->SMTPAuth = true;
$mail->Username ="username";
$mail->Password="passw";
//$mail->FromName = $header;
$mail->FromName = mb_convert_encoding($header, "UTF-8", "auto");
$mail->AddAddress($emladd);
$mail->AddAddress("mytest#gmail.com");
$mail->AddBCC('mytest2#mydomain.org', 'firstadd');
$mail->Subject = $sub;
$mail->Body = $message;
$mail->WordWrap = 50;
if(!$mail->Send()) {
echo 'Message was not sent.';
echo 'Mailer error: ' . $mail->ErrorInfo;
}
The $message contains latin characters. Unfortunately all webmail (gmail, webmail.mydomain.org, emailaddress.domain.xx) is using a different coding.
How can I force to use UTF-8 coding to show my mail exactly the same on all mailboxes?
I tried to convert the mail header width mb_convert_encoding(), but without luck.

Answer 1

If you are 100% sure $message contain ISO-8859-1 you can use utf8_encode as David says. Otherwise use mb_detect_encoding and mb_convert_encoding on $message.
Also take note that
$mail -> charSet = "UTF-8";
Should be replaced by:
$mail->CharSet = "UTF-8";
And placed after the instantiation of the class (after the new). The properties are case sensitive! See the PHPMailer doc fot the list & exact spelling.
Also the default encoding of PHPMailer is 8bit which can be problematic with UTF-8 data. To fix this you can do:
$mail->Encoding = 'base64';
Take note that 'quoted-printable' would probably work too in these cases (and maybe even 'binary'). For more details you can read RFC1341 - Content-Transfer-Encoding Header Field.

Answer 2

$mail -> CharSet = "UTF-8";
$mail = new PHPMailer();
line $mail -> CharSet = "UTF-8"; must be after $mail = new PHPMailer();
try this
$mail = new PHPMailer();
$mail->CharSet = "UTF-8";

Answer 3

I work myself this way
$mail->FromName = utf8_decode($_POST['name']);
http://php.net/manual/en/function.utf8-decode.php

Answer 4

When non of the above works, and still mails looks like ª הודפסה ×•× ×©×œ:
$mail->addCustomHeader('Content-Type', 'text/plain;charset=utf-8');
$mail->Subject = '=?UTF-8?B?' . base64_encode($subject) . '?=';;

Answer 5

Sorry for being late on the party. Depending on your server configuration, You may be required to specify character strictly with lowercase letters utf-8, otherwise it will be ignored. Try this if you end up here searching for solutions and none of answers above helps:
$mail->CharSet = "UTF-8";
should be replaced with:
$mail->CharSet = "utf-8";

Answer 6

I was getting ó in $mail->Subject /w PHPMailer.
So for me the complete solution is:
// Your Subject with tildes. Example.
$someSubjectWithTildes = 'Subscripción España';
$mailer->CharSet = 'UTF-8';
$mailer->Encoding = 'quoted-printable';
$mailer->Subject = html_entity_decode($someSubjectWithTildes);
Hope it helps.

Answer 7

$mail = new PHPMailer();
$mail->CharSet = "UTF-8";
$mail->Encoding = "16bit";

Answer 8

The simplest way and will help you with is set CharSet to UTF-8
$mail->CharSet = "UTF-8"

Answer 9

To avoid problems of character encoding in sending emails using the class PHPMailer we can configure it to send it with UTF-8 character encoding using the "CharSet" parameter, as we can see in the following Php code:
$mail = new PHPMailer();
$mail->From = 'midireccion#email.com';
$mail->FromName = 'Mi nombre';
$mail->AddAddress('emaildestino#email.com');
$mail->Subject = 'Prueba';
$mail->Body = '';
$mail->IsHTML(true);
// Active condition utf-8
$mail->CharSet = 'UTF-8';
// Send mail
$mail->Send();