HTML Form to Email with Attachment using PHP

Do you know How the HTML to email with attachments works? I will explain that in this post

Lets start with our Goal

Our goal is to create an HTML form with a file field, when someone clicks the submit button we want to receive the data with attachment in our email.

Before we started to this everyone for the big support my HTML form to PHP mail post. As per my subscriber’s request, I made this new tutorial. to send any attachment via HTML form to the email we can use phpmail function. here is am giving an example of how to do it.

Create form for html to email with attachments 

First create an HTML form with enctype=”multipart/form-data” because we are transferring files .

<form action="mail.php" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">
    <input type="text" name="name" placeholder="Name"> <br>
    <input type="text" name="email" placeholder="email"> <br>
    <input type="text" name="message" placeholder="Message"> <br>
    <input type="file" name="file"> <br>
    <input type="submit" value="Submit">
</form>

this is just a HTML boilerplate. you can add your class and modify with your website design.

Now we have to create our PHP file which will process the data when the form submit.

Here we are getting the data from the form and making a message string and encoding the uploaded attachment into base64 format and send it to your email address,

When the email hit your inbox it will decode the base64 object and display the attachment

mail.php file

<?php

    $filenameee =  $_FILES['file']['name'];
    $fileName = $_FILES['file']['tmp_name']; 
    $name = $_POST['name'];
    $email = $_POST['email'];
    $usermessage = $_POST['message'];
    
    $message ="Name = ". $name . "\r\n  Email = " . $email . "\r\n Message =" . $usermessage; 
    
    $subject ="My email subject";
    $fromname ="My Website Name";
    $fromemail = '[email protected]';  //if u dont have an email create one on your cpanel

    $mailto = '[email protected]';  //the email which u want to recv this email




    $content = file_get_contents($fileName);
    $content = chunk_split(base64_encode($content));

    // a random hash will be necessary to send mixed content
    $separator = md5(time());

    // carriage return type (RFC)
    $eol = "\r\n";

    // main header (multipart mandatory)
    $headers = "From: ".$fromname." <".$fromemail.">" . $eol;
    $headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0" . $eol;
    $headers .= "Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=\"" . $separator . "\"" . $eol;
    $headers .= "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit" . $eol;
    $headers .= "This is a MIME encoded message." . $eol;

    // message
    $body = "--" . $separator . $eol;
    $body .= "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=\"iso-8859-1\"" . $eol;
    $body .= "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit" . $eol;
    $body .= $message . $eol;

    // attachment
    $body .= "--" . $separator . $eol;
    $body .= "Content-Type: application/octet-stream; name=\"" . $filenameee . "\"" . $eol;
    $body .= "Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64" . $eol;
    $body .= "Content-Disposition: attachment" . $eol;
    $body .= $content . $eol;
    $body .= "--" . $separator . "--";

    //SEND Mail
    if (mail($mailto, $subject, $body, $headers)) {
        echo "mail send ... OK"; // do what you want after sending the email
        
        
    } else {
        echo "mail send ... ERROR!";
        print_r( error_get_last() );
    }

      

Important Notes :

• This will not work in your desktop or Localhost
• You have to host it in a server to make it work.
• Some free hosting providers not allow you to send emails from your website (eg : 000webhost)
• Sometimes you have to add a valid from email address to work with this
• Maximum file size is 25 , if you are attaching bigger files, it may not work. anyway its depend on your server provider.

Check out the video for more details and to know how to implement html to email with attachments

Download Source Code  : 

If you are still having doubts about how to work with HTML to email with attachments forms you can check out my Youtube video explaining everything in detail.