Sending email through PHP

Intro

Thousands of websites use contact forms to communicate with their users. You will have almost certainly seen one if not used one to contact someone. The contact form will take the users information that he or she has filled in then send the data over to our php script for processing. In our case the data will be sent over to us in an email.


Creating the HTML Feedback Form

Below is the HTML code to create our feedback form.

html Syntax (Toggle Plain Text)

<form method="post" action="sendmail.php">
Email: < input name="email" type="text" />
Message:
<textarea name="message" rows="10" cols="30">
</textarea>
<input type="submit" />
</form>

<form method="post" action="sendmail.php"> Email: < input name="email" type="text" /> Message: <textarea name="message" rows="10" cols="30"> </textarea> <input type="submit" /> </form>

The form will take the email address and message from the user and sends the information to sendmail.php via the form, action="sendmail.php".

The php script will know which piece of information being sent by the input name="" tag. So we know the email will be typed in the email box by the name tag: name="email"

The PHP code to sendmail

Now we have set the form to POST the data to sendmail.php we need to create a new file named “sendmail.php". Once you have created the file you can enter the following code into your empty php file. Don’t worry I’ll explain each line in a moment.

php Syntax (Toggle Plain Text)

<?
$email = $_GET['email'] ;
$message = $_GET['message'] ;
mail( "yourname@example.com", "Email Subject", $message, "From: $email" );
print "Congratulations your email has been sent";
?>

<? $email = $_GET['email'] ; $message = $_GET['message'] ; mail( "yourname@example.com", "Email Subject", $message, "From: $email" ); print "Congratulations your email has been sent"; ?>

Okay this script will now send email out using php’s sendmail function yeh! Now I’ve got some explaining to do.

Line 2 - 3: These get the data from the form keeping in mind the email form box is named name="email" and the $_GET variable is also called email.

Line 4: This is the clever part that sends the email, The mail() function allows to… specify the email address of the recipient, place the the subject of the email which will appear in the subject line, puts the message of the email which appears in the emails main body and the function allows you to specify the senders email so the recipient can then send a reply if required.

The sendmail function is no way limited to this configuration but as a beginner tutorial this is the minimum information you need to make mail() work.

For more information on the sendmail function then please goto phps sendmail function page.

line 5 - Will display “Congratulations your email has been sent"

I hope the tutorial helps any comments or question as always can be post below.