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I am trying to use the MailManager class in Drupal 8 to send HTML mail. I got it working, but it isn't parsing the HTML markup. I think something is wrong with the headers of the email.

What I have is a custom module (Custom_forward) that contains a form and that calls Mailmanager::mail() in its submitForm() method, which contains the following code.

        // Email body
        $header = $sender . ' thought you would like to see this page from the website.';
        $personal_message = $form_state->getValues()['message_body'];
        $entity_url_value = '<a href="' . $entity_url->toString() . '">Go to article</a>';
        $message = $header . '<br>' . $personal_message . '<br>' . $entity_url_value;

        // Email
        $langcode = 'en';
        $mailManager = \Drupal::service('plugin.manager.mail');
        $to = $form_state->getValues()['recipient'];

        $params['title'] = 'Forward';
        $params['message'] = $message;
        $result = $mailManager->mail('custom_forward', 'forward', $to, $langcode, $params, NULL, true);

        if ($result['result'] !== true) {
            drupal_set_message(t('There was a problem sending your message and it was not sent.'), 'error');
            \Drupal::logger('mail-log')->error($message);
        }
        else {
            drupal_set_message(t('Your message has been sent.'));
        }

According to Drupal you also need the hook_mail method in mytheme.theme to be able to send message, you can see this method here:

function custom_forward_mail($key, &$message, $params) {
  $message['body'] = [];
  $message['subject'] = [];
  $message['headers'] = array(
    'content-type' => 'text/html',
    'charset' => 'UTF-8',
    'format' => 'flowed',
    'delsp' => 'yes',
    'from' => \Drupal::config('system.site')->get('mail')
  );

  switch ($key) {
    case 'forward':
      $message['subject'] = $params['title'];
      $message['body'][] = '<html><body>' . $params['message'] . '</body></html>';
      break;
  }
}

As you can see, I am setting the content type to text/html and that should tell the mail system to parse the content as an HTML, but this is not working for some reasons.

This is a testing email. All the HTML markup is not shown, but also not working.

Bassem thought you would like to see this page from the website. personal message Go to article [1] [1] http://myhost/node/81
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3
  • 1
    Why would you want to write custom code for this? Just use Mime Mail.
    – colan
    Jan 23, 2018 at 19:44
  • I ended up using mail system and swift mailer modules. Custom code is for doing a customized behaviour ( forwarding an article from one user to another )
    – Bassem Mohamed
    Jan 24, 2018 at 13:16
  • 1
    Ah, okay. I chose Mime Mail because it didn't require an external library, unlike Swift Mailer.
    – colan
    Jan 24, 2018 at 19:39

2 Answers 2

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Without any module it is not possible to send HTML emails. This is because the default plugin the MailManager class (which is a plugin manager) uses to effectively send emails contains the following code. (See PhpMail.php.)

public function format(array $message) {

    // Join the body array into one string.
    $message['body'] = implode("\n\n", $message['body']);

    // Convert any HTML to plain-text.
    $message['body'] = MailFormatHelper::htmlToText($message['body']);

    // Wrap the mail body for sending.
    $message['body'] = MailFormatHelper::wrapMail($message['body']);
    return $message;
  }

The comment clearly states: Convert any HTML to plain-text.

If you look at MailFormatHelper::htmlToText(), you will see the code that is converting the HTML markup in plain text, in particular the following that changes any <a> tag as you saw in your test email.

  // Replace inline <a> tags with the text of link and a footnote.
  // 'See <a href="https://www.drupal.org">the Drupal site</a>' becomes
  // 'See the Drupal site [1]' with the URL included as a footnote.
  static::htmlToMailUrls(NULL, TRUE);
  $pattern = '@(<a[^>]+?href="([^"]*)"[^>]*?>(.+?)</a>)@i';
  $string = preg_replace_callback($pattern, 'static::htmlToMailUrls', $string);
  $urls = static::htmlToMailUrls();
  $footnotes = '';
  if (count($urls)) {
    $footnotes .= "\n";
    for ($i = 0, $max = count($urls); $i < $max; $i++) {
      $footnotes .= '[' . ($i + 1) . '] ' . $urls[$i] . "\n";
    }
  }

You need a module that defines a new mail plugin using a different implementation of the format() method and make the MailManager class use it. As said in the documentation for MailManager::getInstance(), the class uses the configuration in system.mail.interface. (The array returned from \Drupal::config('system.mail.interface').) In your example, an array value for custom_forward_formard (e.g. 'custom_forward_forward => 'custom_forward_mail', where custom_forward_mail is the plugin ID for the class implemented by your module) would do the trick.

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1

The default mail module would not let you send html mail, but there is a hack for that. before assigning html variable to body please use PHP function htmlentities, it prevent html tags being removed from message. and you can get the html mail. 

$message['body'][] =  htmlentities($msg);

this is for quick hack.. without altering any core codes.

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2
  • This sends it to my spam folder, so would not recommend!
    – Stef Van Looveren
    Dec 30, 2020 at 22:20
  • All this does is send a mangled plain text email, where for example '<' is changed to '&lt;' and single quotes are changed to '&#039;' etc.
    – anonymous
    Jan 28, 2021 at 18:57

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