Doc #63416 [Com]: WRONG STATEMENTS IN MAIL FUNCTION DOCS

Edit report at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=63416&edit=1 ID: 63416 Comment by: jakopino at gmail dot com Reported by: jakopino at gmail dot com Summary: WRONG STATEMENTS IN MAIL FUNCTION DOCS Status: Open Type: Documentation Problem Package: *Mail Related Operating System: Any PHP Version: 5.3.18 Block user comment: N Private report: N New Comment: Correct, ASCII text transmitted across the network *must* use the two-character sequence: CR LF. But PHP behaves differently, on windows it talks directly to the mail server using SMTP protocol. In this case it should comply with the RCF as the message travels the network. Even more, on windows, PHP code ( in /win32/sendmail.c ) tries to distinguish various system specific EOL cases and behaves accordingly to comply with the RFC. On unix systems, the php mail function sends commands to the sendmail binary ( or whatever you set as the ‘sendmail_path’ in php.ini ). This is the same as typing commands on the prompt, it *MUST* escape new lines with LF. At the end, the message will be stored in the appropriate folder and the mail server will take care to process it correctly. Finally, the message will be sent out on the network. That’s why you should use PHP_EOL with the mail function as it is the only way to ensure headers will terminate properly on different platforms. I think you should remove the second note on poor quality unix smtp server ( as that is never the case ), and change all the examples in the documentation page to reflect the correct usage of line termination with the PHP_EOL constant ( by the way, it looks like it was introduced for the mail function ): Previous Comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2012-11-03 00:22:10] niel dot archer at gmail dot com PHP does not change SMTP behaviour, it complies with it. See section 2.1 of RFC2822 which states: "Messages are divided into lines of characters. A line is a series of characters that is delimited with the two characters, carriage-return and line-feed; that is, the carriage return (CR) character (ASCII value 13) followed immediately by the line feed (LF) character (ASCII value 10)." The CRLF combination in the examples tells the mail agent that those lines are ended. It is quite legitimate to have LF characters within a line before its end, example one does this with the $message variable. Mail should *never* use PHP_EOL as it would break the SMTP standard. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2012-11-02 01:01:08] jakopino at gmail dot com Some poor quality Unix mail transfer agents replace LF by CRLF automatically (which leads to doubling CR if CRLF is used). This should be a last resort, as it does not comply with » RFC 2822. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2012-11-02 00:57:58] jakopino at gmail dot com Description: ------------ --- From manual page: http://www.php.net/function.mail#refsect1-function.mail-seealso --- PHP cannot change SMTP behavior. Newlines must be issued using the correct sequence, this sequence must be platform independent, that's why we have the PHP_EOL constant. It's well documented by a 7 year old thread ( https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=15841 ). -------------------------------------------------------------------------- The mail function docs page is full of examples, all of them are using the windows newline sequence, without mentioning the real problem. Please correct that page -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dario Jakopec Macro Web Media PS Paralles Plesk Pannel 11 is using Qmail as default smtp server... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Edit this bug report at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=63416&edit=1