My PHP script sends email to users and when the email arrives to their mailboxes, the subject line (`$subject`) has characters like `a^£` added to the end of my subject text. This is obviously and encoding problem. The email message content itself is fine, just the subject line is broken.

I have searched all over but can’t find **how to encode my subject properly**.

This is my header. Notice that I’m using `Content-Type` with `charset=utf-8` and `Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit`.

```
//set all necessary headers
$headers = "From: $sender_name<$from>\n";
$headers .= "Reply-To: $sender_name<$from>\n";
$headers .= "X-Sender: $sender_name<$from>\n";
$headers .= "X-Mailer: PHP4\n"; //mailer
$headers .= "X-Priority: 3\n"; //1 UrgentMessage, 3 Normal
$headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0\n";
$headers .= "X-MSMail-Priority: High\n";
$headers .= "Importance: 3\n";
$headers .= "Date: $date\n";
$headers .= "Delivered-to: $to\n";
$headers .= "Return-Path: $sender_name<$from>\n";
$headers .= "Envelope-from: $sender_name<$from>\n";
$headers .= "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n";
$headers .= "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n";

```