PHP Emails Not Sending On GoDaddy? Here’s How I Fixed It.

Troubleshooting PHP Email Sending Issues on Shared Hosting

If you’re running an e-commerce application on a shared host, you may encounter issues with sending emails. I recently faced this with my PHP web app on GoDaddy. The problem was there’s a limitation on the number of characters per line that caused the email to not be sent.

This issue happened with GoDaddy, but I assume it’s common across other shared web hosts.

The Problem

The code for generating the body of the email followed this format:

<?php 

 $totalCost   = 0;
 $emailHeader = "Cart information:";
 $emailBody   = "";

 foreach ($arrOrders as $item) {
  
  $emailBody .= "<p><strong>". $item['itemName'] . "</strong>";
  $emailBody .= "<br>" . "Details: " . $item['itemDetails'];
  $totalCost = $totalCost + $item['itemCost'];
  
 }
 
 $emailFooter = "<br>Total Cost: " . currencyFormat($totalCost);
 
 $emailMessage = $emailHeader . $emailBody . $emailFooter;

?>

If there were several items in the order, the email wouldn’t send.

I even tried printing out if the email successfully sent:

<?php 

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

if ($result) {
    echo "Email sent successfully.";
} else {
    echo "Email sending failed.";
}
?>

But it printed out the successful message every time, even when I didn’t get the email!

A quick search indicated that there’s no limit in the number of characters in the body content of a PHP email using the mail() function.

I found a Stack Overflow question that mentioned there was a limit of 990 characters per line.

The Solution

Inside the loop of generating the list of items, I forced in carriage return, adding in \r\n

// before
$emailBody .= "<p><strong>". $item['itemName'] . "</strong>";

// after  
$emailBody .= "\r\n<p><strong>". $item['itemName'] . "</strong>"; 

And that fixed it!

The Takeaway

When sending emails with PHP on a shared host, be mindful of line lengths in your email body. Adding line breaks may prevent undelivered emails.