How to embed images in html email

Question

I'm trying to implement a code to send HTML email with embedded image.

I already tried for simple HTML email with image but this image is taken from server.

>And I don't want to use any library like PEAR Why is that? Any reasonable arguments on why do you need to reinvent the wheel? — Vladislav Rastrusny, Oct 22 '09 at 12:52

score 77 · Answer 1 · edited Dec 25 '22 at 00:48

I would strongly recommend using a library like PHPMailer to send emails.
It's easier and handles most of the issues automatically for you.

Regarding displaying embedded (inline) images, here's what's on their documentation:

Inline Attachments

There is an additional way to add an attachment. If you want to make a HTML e-mail with images incorporated into the desk, it's necessary to attach the image and then link the tag to it. For example, if you add an image as inline attachment with the CID my-photo, you would access it within the HTML e-mail with <img src="cid:my-photo" alt="my-photo" />.

In detail, here is the function to add an inline attachment:

$mail->AddEmbeddedImage(filename, cid, name);
//By using this function with this example's value above, results in this code:
$mail->AddEmbeddedImage('my-photo.jpg', 'my-photo', 'my-photo.jpg ');

To give you a more complete example of how it would work:

<?php
require_once('../class.phpmailer.php');
$mail = new PHPMailer(true); // the true param means it will throw exceptions on     errors, which we need to catch

$mail->IsSMTP(); // telling the class to use SMTP

try {
  $mail->Host       = "mail.yourdomain.com"; // SMTP server
  $mail->Port       = 25;                    // set the SMTP port
  $mail->SetFrom('name@yourdomain.com', 'First Last');
  $mail->AddAddress('whoto@otherdomain.com', 'John Doe');
  $mail->Subject = 'PHPMailer Test';

  $mail->AddEmbeddedImage("rocks.png", "my-attach", "rocks.png");
  $mail->Body = 'Your <b>HTML</b> with an embedded Image: <img src="cid:my-attach"> Here is an image!';

  $mail->AddAttachment('something.zip'); // this is a regular attachment (Not inline)
  $mail->Send();
  echo "Message Sent OK<p></p>\n";
} catch (phpmailerException $e) {
  echo $e->errorMessage(); //Pretty error messages from PHPMailer
} catch (Exception $e) {
  echo $e->getMessage(); //Boring error messages from anything else!
}
?>

###Edit:

Regarding your comment, you asked how to send HTML email with embedded images, so I gave you an example of how to do that.
The library I told you about can send emails using a lot of methods other than SMTP.
Take a look at the PHPMailer Example page for other examples.

One way or the other, if you don't want to send the email in the ways supported by the library, you can (should) still use the library to build the message, then you send it the way you want.

For example:

You can replace the line that send the email:

$mail->Send();

With this:

$mime_message = $mail->CreateBody(); //Retrieve the message content
echo $mime_message; // Echo it to the screen or send it using whatever method you want

Hi Carlos You are Excellent,but I'm not satisfied with your given example coz you solved my problem using smtp server, & I'm not using SMTP Server I'm working on simple fire ftp But any way thanks for your help — amol, Dec 07 '09 at 06:10
Updated the answer with an alternative. Hope that helps! Good luck :) — Carlos Lima, Dec 07 '09 at 07:26
I had to add `$mail->IsHTML(true);` to get the image embedded. — Wouter Berkes, Jun 06 '13 at 09:53

Arthur Halma · Answer 2 · 2011-12-21T08:14:11.893

I'm using this function that find all images in my letter and attaches it to the message.

Parameters: Takes your HTML (which you want to send);
Return: The necessary HTML and headers, which you can use in mail();

Example usage:

define("DEFCALLBACKMAIL", "yourmail@yourdomain.com"); // WIll be shown as "from".
$final_msg = preparehtmlmail($html); // give a function your html*

mail('your@mail.com', 'your subject', $final_msg['multipart'], $final_msg['headers']); 
// send email with all images from html attached to letter


function preparehtmlmail($html) {

  preg_match_all('~<img.*?src=.([\/.a-z0-9:_-]+).*?>~si',$html,$matches);
  $i = 0;
  $paths = array();

  foreach ($matches[1] as $img) {
    $img_old = $img;

    if(strpos($img, "http://") == false) {
      $uri = parse_url($img);
      $paths[$i]['path'] = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].$uri['path'];
      $content_id = md5($img);
      $html = str_replace($img_old,'cid:'.$content_id,$html);
      $paths[$i++]['cid'] = $content_id;
    }
  }

  $boundary = "--".md5(uniqid(time()));
  $headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0\n";
  $headers .="Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=\"$boundary\"\n";
  $headers .= "From: ".DEFCALLBACKMAIL."\r\n";
  $multipart = '';
  $multipart .= "--$boundary\n";
  $kod = 'utf-8';
  $multipart .= "Content-Type: text/html; charset=$kod\n";
  $multipart .= "Content-Transfer-Encoding: Quot-Printed\n\n";
  $multipart .= "$html\n\n";

  foreach ($paths as $path) {
    if(file_exists($path['path']))
      $fp = fopen($path['path'],"r");
      if (!$fp)  {
        return false;
      }

    $imagetype = substr(strrchr($path['path'], '.' ),1);
    $file = fread($fp, filesize($path['path']));
    fclose($fp);

    $message_part = "";

    switch ($imagetype) {
      case 'png':
      case 'PNG':
            $message_part .= "Content-Type: image/png";
            break;
      case 'jpg':
      case 'jpeg':
      case 'JPG':
      case 'JPEG':
            $message_part .= "Content-Type: image/jpeg";
            break;
      case 'gif':
      case 'GIF':
            $message_part .= "Content-Type: image/gif";
            break;
    }

    $message_part .= "; file_name = \"$path\"\n";
    $message_part .= 'Content-ID: <'.$path['cid'].">\n";
    $message_part .= "Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64\n";
    $message_part .= "Content-Disposition: inline; filename = \"".basename($path['path'])."\"\n\n";
    $message_part .= chunk_split(base64_encode($file))."\n";
    $multipart .= "--$boundary\n".$message_part."\n";

  }

  $multipart .= "--$boundary--\n";
  return array('multipart' => $multipart, 'headers' => $headers);  
}

Please note that the edited solution is no longer working due to the fact random put a * instead of a ; after this line: `$final_msg = preparehtmlmail($html)`. After changing that, it works almost perfect: now it still displays DEFFCALLBACKMAIL in the from field... — laarsk, Dec 20 '11 at 15:50
Is it this working? I tried and file_name = \"$path\"\n says file_name = Array in the email — jrosell, Jun 27 '12 at 14:24
Should have just used `strtolower()` on the image extension too :P — Seer, Mar 12 '13 at 09:19
$_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].$uri['path']; should be : $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/'.$uri['path']; — zeuf, Jun 10 '19 at 15:51

score 17 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 05 '09 at 10:47

PHPMailer has the ability to automatically embed images from your HTML email. You have to give full path in the file system, when writing your HTML:

<img src="/var/www/host/images/photo.png" alt="my photo" />

It will automaticaly convert to:

<img src="cid:photo.png" alt="my photo" />

score 2 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 28 '15 at 09:56

Based on Arthur Halma's answer, I did the following that works correctly with Apple's, Android & iOS mail.

define("EMAIL_DOMAIN", "yourdomain.com");

public function send_email_html($to, $from, $subject, $html) {
  preg_match_all('~<img.*?src=.([\/.a-z0-9:_-]+).*?>~si',$html,$matches);
  $i = 0;
  $paths = array();
  foreach ($matches[1] as $img) {
    $img_old = $img;
    if(strpos($img, "http://") == false) {
      $uri = parse_url($img);
      $paths[$i]['path'] = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].$uri['path'];
      $content_id = md5($img);
      $html = str_replace($img_old,'cid:'.$content_id,$html);
      $paths[$i++]['cid'] = $content_id;
    }
  }
  $uniqid   = md5(uniqid(time()));
  $boundary = "--==_mimepart_".$uniqid;

  $headers = "From: ".$from."\n".
  'Reply-to: '.$from."\n".
  'Return-Path: '.$from."\n".
  'Message-ID: <'.$uniqid.'@'.EMAIL_DOMAIN.">\n".
  'Date: '.gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s', time())."\n".
  'Mime-Version: 1.0'."\n".
  'Content-Type: multipart/related;'."\n".
  '  boundary='.$boundary.";\n".
  '  charset=UTF-8'."\n".
  'X-Mailer: PHP/' . phpversion();

  $multipart = '';
  $multipart .= "--$boundary\n";
  $kod = 'UTF-8';
  $multipart .= "Content-Type: text/html; charset=$kod\n";
  $multipart .= "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7-bit\n\n";
  $multipart .= "$html\n\n";
  foreach ($paths as $path) {
    if (file_exists($path['path']))
      $fp = fopen($path['path'],"r");
      if (!$fp)  {
        return false;
      }
    $imagetype = substr(strrchr($path['path'], '.' ),1);
    $file = fread($fp, filesize($path['path']));
    fclose($fp);
    $message_part = "";
    switch ($imagetype) {
      case 'png':
      case 'PNG':
            $message_part .= "Content-Type: image/png";
            break;
      case 'jpg':
      case 'jpeg':
      case 'JPG':
      case 'JPEG':
            $message_part .= "Content-Type: image/jpeg";
            break;
      case 'gif':
      case 'GIF':
            $message_part .= "Content-Type: image/gif";
            break;
    }
    $message_part .= "; file_name = \"$path\"\n";
    $message_part .= 'Content-ID: <'.$path['cid'].">\n";
    $message_part .= "Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64\n";
    $message_part .= "Content-Disposition: inline; filename = \"".basename($path['path'])."\"\n\n";
    $message_part .= chunk_split(base64_encode($file))."\n";
    $multipart .= "--$boundary\n".$message_part."\n";
  }
  $multipart .= "--$boundary--\n";
  mail($to, $subject, $multipart, $headers);
}

dazed-and-confused · Answer 5 · 2021-11-30T20:36:02.687

2

This is the code I'm using to embed images into HTML mail and PDF documents.

<?php
$logo_path = 'http://localhost/img/logo.jpg';
$type = pathinfo($logo_path, PATHINFO_EXTENSION);
$image_contents = file_get_contents($logo_path);
$image64 = 'data:image/' . $type . ';base64,' . base64_encode($image_contents);
?>
<img src="<?php echo $image64 ?>" />

edited Nov 30 '21 at 20:36

answered Dec 21 '20 at 14:50

dazed-and-confused

1,293
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score 1 · Answer 6 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:10

1

Here is a way to get a string variable without having to worry about the coding.

If you have Mozilla Thunderbird, you can use it to fetch the html image code for you.

I wrote a little tutorial here, complete with a screenshot (it's for powershell, but that doesn't matter for this):

powershell email with html picture showing red x

And again:

How to embed images in email

edited May 23 '17 at 12:10

Community

1
1

answered Aug 02 '13 at 04:51

bgmCoder

6,205
8
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105

score 1 · Answer 7 · answered Dec 05 '09 at 09:48

1

You have to encode your email as multipart mime and then you can attach emails as attachments basically. You reference them by cid in the email.

Alternatively you could not attach them to the email and use URLs directly but most mail programs will block this as spammers use the trick to detect the liveness of email addresses.

You don't say what language but here is one example.

answered Dec 05 '09 at 09:48

cletus

616,129
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sir how can i encode my email as multipart mime, means is any code for this? – amol Dec 05 '09 at 09:51

score 0 · Answer 8 · answered Apr 02 '21 at 03:53

0

I made to golang command line to this job, the key part is doing cid replacement:

https://github.com/gonejack/embed-email

answered Apr 02 '21 at 03:53

igonejack

2,366
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How to embed images in html email

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