Hyphen issues with mail()

[MarlaJ]

I have created an email which queries my MySQL database for the email distribution list, assigning the email list to the variable $to. It appears that any time I have a hyphen in the email address it messes up and I think it's putting in a hard return after each hyphen so the email list isn't being created correctly. How do I get rid of this problem? Do I need to escape out the hyphen and if so, how? Here's the code that creates the list:

$query = "SELECT * FROM distribution";
		$result = mysql_query($query,$conn);
		$list =  "";
		if ($result<>0)
			{
				while ($content = mysql_fetch_assoc($result))
					{	
						$list = $list.$content['email'].&quot;, &quot;;						
						$to = substr(&quot;$list&quot;, 0, -1);  
					}					
			}
		else 
			{
				echo &quot;No records found&quot;;
			}

Thanks for any help!

 

[sleipnir214]

Unless your users all want their email addresses known to each other, I would not put all the addresses together in a single TO:. I'd send individual emails.

MySQL should not be putting any hard returns after dashes. Have you verified the quality of the addresses in the database?

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[dgwilliams]

im not sure i understand but i use this to tidy some of my queries up might help for you, sorry if this is completley rubbish advice.

trim($query);

i suppose you could try to use this for the result produced.

i.e trim($result);

once again this is just a guess. wait till an expert replies

 

[MarlaJ]

For this list it doesn't matter if all the users see the other addresses - it's an internal corporate email and people need to be able to respond back to all other users. I have verified all the email addresses and the problem arises only with hyphenated addresses.

I should note that I realized that I need my $to = substr("$list", 0, -1); outside of the while loop but that isn't working either now (I was trying to get rid of my trailing comma).

 

[sleipnir214]

Again, is your code putting the hyphens in the addresses as you go, or do the addresses already exist in the MySQL database?

How have you verified the situation, either way?

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[ingresman]

Can you use BCC (blind carbon copy) to stop other seeing the address ??