title: PHP mail special characters in subject field
body: <p>I would like to insert special characters in the subject of HTML e-mails sent with the PHP mail() function.</p>
  
  <p>I want my subject to look like this:</p>
  
  <p><strong>★ Your new account</strong></p>
  
  <p>I have tried with an HTML entity like <code>&amp;starf;</code> (&starf;) or by pasting the symbol directly in my code but that doesn't work either, except on a few e-mail clients.</p>
  
  <pre><code>$to = 'me@example.com';
  $subject = '★ Your new account or &amp;starf; Your new account';
  $message = 'HTML message...';
  
  $headers = 'MIME-Version: 1.0' . "\r\n";
  $headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8' . "\r\n";
  $headers .= 'From: Me &lt;me@example.com&gt;' . "\r\n";
  
  mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Any advice on how to get this to work properly?
  Thank you.</p>