Please try using this CVS snapshot:

  http://snaps.php.net/php4-latest.tar.gz
 
For Windows:
 
  http://snaps.php.net/win32/php4-win32-latest.zip

Hi,
 Have just tried using the latest snapshot and the bug is still there, no change,
thanks,
Malek

Sorry, but your problem does not imply a bug in PHP itself.  For a
list of more appropriate places to ask for help using PHP, please
visit http://www.php.net/support.php as this bug system is not the
appropriate forum for asking support questions. 

Thank you for your interest in PHP.

You should prepare mime headers(subject line, etc.) to be encoded in base64. Please ask this kind of question at php-i18n@lists.php.net or php-users@php.gr.jp(if you can understand Japanese) which you can subscribe at the appropriate pages of http://www.php.net/ or http://www.php.gr.jp/ respectively, before posting this kind of question to the bug database.

Hi Again,
  I think actually this does, the problem is to do with the way the php mail function handles the subject line, I don't think it is actually a problem with the mb_string hence I originally posted to Mail. 

This bug was not apparent in any other version of php, of which we have around 6 test servers and 5 main servers running. 

It has only started with the 4.3.0 versions. 

If you look closely you can will see that this also does not occur in the message body of the email, just the header. It seams that the mail function can no longer handle '?' character for some reason and replaces it with a blank space. 

In fact I do have a way around this which I am actively using. 
mb_language ( "ja");
mb_send_mail( .... ) which does not seem to be affected by this bug.

I do not mind using mb_send_mail() from now on if this issue is not going to be fixed but this is kinda annoying when you don't necessary always want to write Japanese emails or use the base64 encoded subject lines. 

Just to note, I know for a fact several big companies using php in Japan are going to start experiencing this problem very soon if the decide to upgrade to 4.3. As from what I have seen they all tend to use the mail function which has worked very well up to now rather that the mb_send_mail function.

Anyway thank for you help and time,
sorry that it could not be fixed,
thanks,
Malek

p.s. if after reading this you still think it not a bug please change back to bogus, just put on open now to make sure you get this mail.

mb_send_mail() is smart enough to choose the appropriate encoding for the language in which a mail is written. So it's not likely that you are bothered by unnecessary encoding performed by this function. See the test cases for mb_send_mail() that reside in ext/mbstring/tests/mb_send_mail*.phpt for detail.

Anyway you should use mb_send_mail() in case you want to send mails composed in the character sets other than US-ASCII or ISO-8859-* since some MUA don't accept bare multibyte-encoded strings.

Regards,
Moriyoshi

Ok, thanks for the response,
Malek