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PHP Tutorial
Part 5 - E-mail With
PHP
Introduction
One
of the major uses of a server side scripting language is
to provide a way of sending e-mail from the server and,
in particular, to take form input and output it to an
e-mail address. In this part I will show you how to send
e-mail messages using PHP.
The Mail
Command
Mail is extremely easy
to send from PHP, unlike using scripting languages which
require special setup (like CGI). There is actually just
one command, mail() for sending mail. It is used as
follows:
mail($to,$subject,$body,$headers);
In
this example I have used variables as they have
descriptive names but you could also just place text in
the mail command. Firstly, $to. This variable (or
section of the command) contains the e-mail address to
which the mail will be sent. $subject is the section for
the subject of the e-mail and $body is the actual text
of the e-mail.
The section $headers is used for
any additional e-mail headers you may want to add. The
most common use of this is for the From field of an
e-mai but you can also include other headers like cc and
bcc.
Sending An
E-mail
Before sending your mail,
if you are using variables, you must, of course, set up
the variable content beforehand. Here is some simple
code for sending a message:
$to = "php@gowansnet.com";
$subject
= "PHP Is Great";
$body = "PHP is one of the best
scripting languages around";
$headers = "From:
webmaster@gowansnet.com\n";
mail($to,$subject,$body,$headers);
echo
"Mail sent to $to";
This code will
acutally do two things. Firstly it will send a message
to php@gowansnet.com with the subject 'PHP Is Great' and
the text:
PHP is one of the best scripting
languages around
and the e-mail will be from
webmaster@gowansnet.com. It will also output the
text:
Mail sent to php@gowansnet.com
to
the browser.
Formatting
E-mail
Something you may have
noticed from the example is that the From line ended
with \n. This is acutally a very important character
when sending e-mail. It is the new line character and
tells PHP to take a new line in an e-mail. It is very
important that this is put in after each header you add
so that your e-mail will follow the international
standards and will be delivered.
The \n code can
also be used in the body section of the e-mail to put
line breaks in but should not be used in the subject or
the To field.
Mail Without
Variables
The e-mail above could
have been sent using different variable names (it is the
position of the variables in relation to the commas, not
the name of them which decides on their use). It could
also have been done on one line using text like
this:
mail("php@gowansnet.com","PHP Is
Great","PHP is one of the best scripting languages
around","From:
webmaster@gowansnet.com\n");
But that
would make your code slightly harder to
read.
Error
Control
As anyone who has been
scripting for a while will know, it is extremely easy to
make mistakes in your code and it is also very easy to
input an invalid e-mail address (especially if you are
using your script for form to mail). Because of this,
you can add in a small piece of code which will check if
the e-mail is sent:
if(mail($to,$subject,$body,$headers))
{
echo "An e-mail was sent to $to with the subject:
$subject";
} else {
echo "There was a problem
sending the mail. Check your code and make sure that the
e-mail address $to is valid";
}
This
code is quite self explanitory. If the mail is sent
successfully it will output a message to the browser
telling the user, if not, it will display an error
message with some suggestions for correcting the
problem.
Part 6
In
part 6 I will continue covering mail by showing you how
to make a simple form to mail program in PHP.
© 1999 - 2001
David Gowans
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