Sending Mail on Form Submission

You've already seen how to take form responses and print the results to the screen. You're only one step away from sending those responses in an email message, as you'll soon see. Before learning about sending mail, however, read through the next section to make sure that your system is properly configured.

System Configuration for the mail() Function

Before you can use the mail() function to send mail, a few directives must be set up in the php.ini file so that the function works properly. Open php.ini with a text editor and look for these lines:

 [mail function] ; For Win32 only. SMTP = localhost ; For Win32 only. sendmail_from = me@localhost.com ; For Unix only. You may supply arguments as well (default: "sendmail -t -i"). ;sendmail_path = 

If you're using Windows as your Web server platform, the first two directives apply to you. For the mail() function to send mail, it must be able to access a valid outgoing mail server. If you plan to use the outgoing mail server of your ISP (in the following example, we use EarthLink), the entry in php.ini should look like this:

 SMTP = mail.earthlink.net 

The second configuration directive is sendmail_from, which is the email address used in the From header of the outgoing email. It can be overwritten in the mail script itself, but normally operates as the default value. For example:

 sendmail_from = youraddress@yourdomain.com 

A good rule of thumb for Windows users is that whatever outgoing mail server you've set up in your email client on that machine, you should also use as the value of SMTP in php.ini.

If your Web server is running on a Linux/Unix platform, you use the sendmail functionality of that particular machine. In this case, only the last directive applies to you: sendmail_path. The default is sendmail -t -i, but if sendmail is in an odd place or if you need to specify different arguments, feel free to do so, as in the following example:

 sendmail_path = /opt/sendmail -odd -arguments 

After making any changes to php.ini on any platform, you must restart the Web server process for the changes to take effect.



Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache in 24 Hours
Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache in 24 Hours
ISBN: 067232489X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 263

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