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Beginners PHP Tutorial – Sending Mail with PHP

November 10, 2008 at 3:58 pm Leave a comment

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Beginners PHP Tutorial – Sending E-mail Using PHP

PHP has a built in function that can be used to send email to one or more recipients. Some reasons you may want to use a mail function in your program include:

• Staying in touch with your site members via a newsletter.
• Sending a “welcome” message when someone joins your membership site.
• Sending a purchase receipt to someone who has just bought your product or service.
• Running a “Contact Us” form.

Introducing The PHP mail() Function

The mail() function is PHP’s built-in connection to your web site’s mail server. The function accepts up to 5 parameters. The first 3 are required. Let’s look at the parameters:

Parameter	Description
to	The email address of the recipient.
subject	The email’s subject line.
message	The body of the email message.
headers	Any additional headers you want to pass such as “From”, “Cc”, “Bcc” etc. Although this is an optional parameter, I recommend always passing the “From” parameter (your email address), otherwise your server may substitute strange from addresses such as NULL@Servername.com, where ServerName is the actual name of your mail server. Some servers will not send your mail at all unless the from address is provided.
parameters	Other optional parameters sent directly to your mail server. You’ll probably never use these.

How to Send an Email

A quick and dirty way is to simply call the function with each of the parameters separated by commas. Use double quotation marks as shown below:

mail(“somebody@somesite.com”,

  “Welcome to My Site!”,

  “Hello Somebody, thank you for joining my site!”,

  “From: webmaster@mysite.com“);

What we did was pass the 3 required parameters and one of the optional ones. Each parameter was separated by a comma.

Of course, in real life, you probably won’t be hard coding the recipients address. That will come from a contact form post or a MySQL query result.

In that case, you would put all of your email content into variables and pass the variables to the mail() function.

Let’s say that you received a contact form post. The email address of the person posting the form is passed to your script as $_POST[‘to’], and their name is in $_POST[‘name’]. You would set up the parameters like this:

$to =  $_POST['to'];
$name =  $_POST['name'];
$subject =  "Thank you for your message";
$message =  "Hello $name, thanks for contact me. I’ll be in touch soon.";
$from =  "webmaster@mysite.com";
$headers =  "From: $from";
// Send email
mail($to,$subject,$message,$headers);

And that’s all it takes to send simple text-based email from PHP. Sending HTML email, or email with attachments, is more complicated and may be the subject of a future PHP tutorial.

Entry filed under: PHP. Tags: Beginners PHP Tutorial, PHP Mail Function, PHP Send Mail.