What are the best practices for validating and sanitizing email content in PHP to prevent malicious intent?

Validating and sanitizing email content in PHP is crucial to prevent malicious intent such as injection attacks or spam. To ensure email content is safe, you can use PHP filters to validate the email address format and strip any potentially harmful content. Additionally, you can sanitize the email content by removing any HTML tags or special characters that could be used for malicious purposes.

// Validate and sanitize email content
$email = filter_var($_POST['email'], FILTER_SANITIZE_EMAIL);

if(filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)){
    // Email is valid, proceed with further processing
    // Sanitize the email content
    $sanitized_email = filter_var($email, FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
    
    // Further processing code here
} else {
    // Invalid email address
    echo "Invalid email address";
}