My goal is to send an email with an variable salutation.

These points are working:
1. Load the content from the db and save it in a variable.
2. Post the content with echo on the screen.
3. Send the content with the mail()function.
4. Display a variable called $salutation on the screen.

But I won't get the right output at the screen or per mail, if I save the variable $salutation directly in the html source (db).

I will only get the following result:

$salutation,

blabla

But I want to have this result:

Dear John,

blabla

Do you have an idea?

Thx
Frutilla

If you put it into the database, it gets treated as a string, and won't be expanded as a variable. Probably best way round this is to put into the database some special string like <<salutation>>, or just anything that you are unlikely to type elsewhere, then your script can search for this and replace it with the greeting of your choice.