phpemailemail-attachmentscode-golfmail-form

Simple PHP form: Attachment to email (code golf)


Imagine a user that would like to put a form on their website that would allow a website visitor to upload a file and a simple message, which will immediately be emailed (ie, the file is not stored on the server, or if it is then only temporarily) as a file attachment with the note in the message body.

See more details at http://a2zsollution.com/php-secure-e-mail/

What is the simplest way to accomplish this?

Simplest in terms of:

This is nearly the reverse of: How to get email and their attachments from PHP. It almost could have been answered in Compiling email with multiple attachments in PHP, but it doesn't actually show code.


Solution

  • Just for fun I thought I'd knock it up. It ended up being trickier than I thought because I went in not fully understanding how the boundary part works, eventually I worked out that the starting and ending '--' were significant and off it went.

    <?php
        if(isset($_POST['submit']))
        {
            //The form has been submitted, prep a nice thank you message
            $output = '<h1>Thanks for your file and message!</h1>';
            //Set the form flag to no display (cheap way!)
            $flags = 'style="display:none;"';
    
            //Deal with the email
            $to = 'me@example.com';
            $subject = 'a file for you';
    
            $message = strip_tags($_POST['message']);
            $attachment = chunk_split(base64_encode(file_get_contents($_FILES['file']['tmp_name'])));
            $filename = $_FILES['file']['name'];
    
            $boundary =md5(date('r', time())); 
    
            $headers = "From: webmaster@example.com\r\nReply-To: webmaster@example.com";
            $headers .= "\r\nMIME-Version: 1.0\r\nContent-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=\"_1_$boundary\"";
    
            $message="This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
    
    --_1_$boundary
    Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=\"_2_$boundary\"
    
    --_2_$boundary
    Content-Type: text/plain; charset=\"iso-8859-1\"
    Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
    
    $message
    
    --_2_$boundary--
    --_1_$boundary
    Content-Type: application/octet-stream; name=\"$filename\" 
    Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 
    Content-Disposition: attachment 
    
    $attachment
    --_1_$boundary--";
    
            mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);
        }
    ?>
    <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
    <html>
    <head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
    <title>MailFile</title>
    </head>
    
    <body>
    
    <?php echo $output; ?>
    
    <form enctype="multipart/form-data" action="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];?>" method="post" <?php echo $flags;?>>
    <p><label for="message">Message</label> <textarea name="message" id="message" cols="20" rows="8"></textarea></p>
    <p><label for="file">File</label> <input type="file" name="file" id="file"></p>
    <p><input type="submit" name="submit" id="submit" value="send"></p>
    </form>
    </body>
    </html>
    

    Very barebones really, and obviously the using inline CSS to hide the form is a bit cheap and you'd almost certainly want a bit more feedback to the user! Also, I'd probably spend a bit more time working out what the actual Content-Type for the file is, rather than cheating and using application/octet-stream but that part is quite as interesting.