What are some best practices for PHP beginners to follow when sending emails with special characters like umlauts to avoid common pitfalls and ensure successful delivery?

When sending emails with special characters like umlauts in PHP, it is important to properly encode the subject and body of the email using UTF-8 encoding to ensure successful delivery. One common pitfall is sending emails with special characters without encoding them, which can result in garbled or unreadable content for the recipient. To avoid this issue, you can use the mb_encode_mimeheader function to encode the subject and mb_send_mail function to send the email with proper encoding.

$subject = 'Subject with special characters like ümläuts';
$body = 'Body content with special characters like ümläuts';

$encoded_subject = mb_encode_mimeheader($subject, 'UTF-8');
$encoded_body = mb_convert_encoding($body, 'UTF-8');

$headers = 'From: sender@example.com' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8' . "\r\n";

mb_send_mail('recipient@example.com', $encoded_subject, $encoded_body, $headers);