PHP Mail: Sending ÅÄÖ characters?

Question

I'm trying to send a mail containing ÅÄÖ characters (Swedish).

I've tried changing the mail header to UTF-8 and iso-8859-1, none of which works. I've also tried wrapping the text in utf8_encode() as well as mb_encode_mimeheader(), with no success. In some cases i get chinese characters instead, not really what i want.

I just tried using htmlentities() with no result.

        $values = array(
            'name' => $this->input->post('name'),
            'email' => $this->input->post('email'),
            'ref' => $this->input->post('ref'),
            'sex' => $this->input->post('sex'),
            'age' => $this->input->post('age'),
            'question' => $this->input->post('msg'),
            'ip' => $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']
        );

        $to      = '@live.se';
        $subject = $values['name'] . ' har skickat en fråga!';
        $message  = 'Namn:'.$values['name']." \r\n";
        $message .= "\r\nEmail:".$values['email']." \r\n";
        $message .= "\r\nKön:".(($values['sex'] == 'f') ? 'Kvinna' : 'Man')." \r\n";
        $message .= "\r\nÅlder:".$values['age']." \r\n";
        $message .= "\r\nReferensnummer:".$values['ref']." \r\n";
        $message .= "\r\nMeddelande: \r\n".$values['question'];

        $headers = 'From: [email protected]' . "\r\n" .
            'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' . "\r\n" .
            'Reply-To: ' .$this->input->post('email') . "\r\n" .
            'X-Mailer: PHP/' . phpversion();

        $message = htmlentities($message);

        if(@mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers)) {
            if($this->input->is_ajax_request()) {
                echo 1;
            }else {

                $data['message']['header'] = 'Tack så mycket!';
                $data['message']['content'] = 'Din fråga skickades utan problem! Jag återkommer snarast möjligt.';

                echo $this->load->view('includes/header', array(), true);
                echo $this->load->view('message', $data['message'], true);
                echo $this->load->view('includes/footer', array(), true);
            }
        }else {
            $fail = true;
        }

Answer 1

I don't know if this is the best way to achieve this. But I used to use mail like this:

mail($to, "=?utf-8?B?".base64_encode($subject)."?=", $message, $headers);