What are the potential pitfalls of using the mail() function in PHP for sending emails with special characters?

Special characters in email content can cause encoding issues when using the mail() function in PHP. To avoid this, it's recommended to use the mb_encode_mimeheader() function to properly encode special characters in the email headers. 

$to = 'recipient@example.com';
$subject = 'Subject with special characters: é, ü, etc.';
$message = 'Message with special characters: é, ü, etc.';
$headers = 'From: sender@example.com' . "\r\n" .
    'Reply-To: sender@example.com' . "\r\n" .
    'X-Mailer: PHP/' . phpversion();

$subject = mb_encode_mimeheader($subject, 'UTF-8');
$headers .= 'MIME-Version: 1.0' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8' . "\r\n";

mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);

Keywords

mail function special characters encoding email headers SMTP restrictions

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