Fred Brack   Raleigh, NC

Using PHP to Send Mail from an HTML Form
by Fred Brack
Updated

This page documents how to use PHP to send an email to someone (typically yourself) when a visitor to your website fills in fields on a form and presses Submit.  Learning how to do this was my motivation for exploring PHP, because this is considered the best way to send mail from a web page for several reasons.

If there is any question whether or not PHP runs on your web server, then:  Test your own system for PHP support by clicking here.

You may also view my Introduction to PHP to learn or review the basics of using PHP.

Note that any page which uses PHP is usually expected to have a filetype of .php not .html.  The methodology shown here for sending mail only requires the page which will actually send the mail to have PHP in it, not the page which has the form, so this should not be a problem in adding a form to an existing page on your website.

PHP Mail

You can use PHP to initiate an email to yourself or anyone else, with or without a copy list or blind copy list.  Typically this would be done after a user fills out a form with requested data.  For example, you might wish to use a form for user requests for information from you, to assure yourself of gathering required data.  PHP includes a built-in function called mail to do this.  The format for this function follows:

   mail(to,subject,message,headers,parameters);

where:

  to = the email address of the recipient
  subject = the subject line of the email
  message = the contents of the email in HTML format including (for example) line breaks
  headers = from, cc, and bcc
  parameters = additional parameters to be passed to the SENDMAIL program; not discussed here

Example:

  <?php
  $to      = "me@mydomain.com";
  $subject = "Comments on Your Web Page";
  $message = "filled in based on input form";
  $from    = "filled in as discussed below";
  $headers = "From:" . $from;
  mail($to,$subject,$message,$headers);
  ?>

The $from value could be the actual email address of the form submitter (assuming you requested it on the form), or you could use a dummy email address such as "NOREPLY@mydomain.com."  The advantage of using the submitter's address would be the ease of REPLYing.  You would build the message from input form values passed to the PHP routine as discussed later.  You can read more about the mail function at w3schools.

The HTML Form

While not intended to be a full discussion of how to create an HTML form (via the <form> tag), we will give examples of relevant portions and show how to link the form to your PHP routine.  You can learn or review how to create the various elements of an HTML form at the w3schools HTML Forms page.

Here is a very simple example of an HTML form to allow a user to send you a message.  First, here's what the form looks like on your web page, then the HTML for it, followed by discussion.

The Form on the Web Page

Please submit your comments below.  Fields marked with an asterisk (*) are required.

(BTW, the form really does work to send me comments ...)

The Form HTML

Discussion of the Form

• If some fields on the form are required, you should tell the user and mark them (typically) with an asterisk as shown.
• It always looks nice if fields in your form are aligned, which is why I designated the "Courier" monospaced font in the <form> tag and why you see those two &nbsp; entities to align input columns.
• The form's action keyword specifies your (PHP) web page to invoke when the Submit button is pressed, and method="post" is the best and standard way to do this.
• The invoked web page to process the input must have a filetype of .php unless your system allows otherwise.
• The first two form entries (name and email) are simple text input fields with whatever (length) size you desire.  For the sake of appearance, I made them the same length.
• The keyword required tells the system not to allow a Submit without a value in that field.  To see what happens, just press "Submit Comments" above without filling in any fields.
• For the freeform message we need a larger field; thus we provide multi-line input via the <textarea> tag instead of <input>.
• The name field in each <input> statement (and <textarea>) is significant, because that is what the field will be named when you process it in your PHP.  Thus, each name must be unique!
• The <input> field with a type="submit" causes a button to be created with whatever text you supply in value.
• If you have created forms before and have not used the <label> tag, you should understand that their use is highly recommended as in improvement over just supplying text because they:
  • Support blind users operating with screen readers because the screen reader will read out loud the label when the user puts focus on the input element; and
  • For users who have difficulty clicking on very small regions (such as checkboxes), when a user clicks the text within the <label> element, it toggles the input (which effectively increases the hit area).
• As an aside, you can specify a class or style for any of these fields to alter their appearance.  For instance, specifying style="background-color: aqua" for the Submit button will make the button background light blue.  I use a class keyword for each of my input fields (though not here) which specifies margin-left: 25px to indent each field a little bit.

The PHP Page to Send the Email

So, now we have three named fields (name, email, and message) being submitted to page sendemail.php.  If that statement is not 100% clear, please review the above HTML form before proceeding.

Let's talk now about the PHP processing of the form's fields.  Remember, the page with the PHP may optionally include regular HTML (in which case the page must start with the <html> tag, etc.), or it can consist of nothing but the PHP code.  We are only going to address the PHP coding here.

Variables passed to PHP via the POST method of the form are retrieved in this manner:

  $email = $_POST['email'];

Read that statement this way:  Set the arbitrarily named PHP variable $email (remember, all PHP variables begin with a dollar-sign) to the variable named email in the HTML form passed by the POST method.  You repeat this for each variable in the form (two more in our case), setting them to whatever names you want in your PHP code.  Figure out what you are going to do for the email's from address, and issue the PHP mail function accordingly.  Here is a simplified version of PHP code to accomplish this (with a reminder that a period is the concatenation indicator, and note the imbedded HTML):

  <?php
  $name    = $_POST['name'];
  $email   = $_POST['email']; // see below to validate address
  $msg     = $_POST['message'];
  $body    = $email . "(" . $name . ") wrote:<br>" . $msg;
  $to      = "me@mydomain.com";
  $subject = "Comments on Your Web Page";
  $headers = "From:" . $email;
  mail($to,$subject,$body,$headers);
  echo "<p>Thank you - your message has been sent. We will contact you shortly.</p>";
  echo "<p>Please click the Back Arrow or press Backspace to return to the previous page.</p>";
  ?>

There are some additional considerations ...

• If you are going to use the person's email address as typed on the page as a "From" address, you should validate it first.  Here's one way to accomplish that:
    if (!filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)) {
    exit("Invalid email format: " . $email . "<br>Please click the Back Arrow or press Backspace to correct and resubmit your form");
  }
• If you are going to specify more than one recipients in the header via From, CC, or BCC, you must separate them with "/r/n".
• If you want to always return to a specific page after a certain number of seconds, you can include the following statement in the <head> section of the HTML on your PHP page:
    <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5;URL=whateverpage.html" />
... where the "5" shown above is the number of seconds the page should display.  You could use this with the previous email validation check (altering the message shown), hoping the person read the error message first!
• Keeping in mind that creating an email is not the same as posting an HTML-formatted message to the screen, if you are going to use multiple lines in your message (for instance, if you gather multiple fields for the message), you should end each line with \r\n on Windows systems.  (I think the \r is not required on other systems...)  That combination essentially inserts a new line indicator; otherwise the lines will run together.  In other words, since this is not treated like HTML, you can't use <br>.  Note this warning which I have copied from the PHP manual:
    Caution:  (Windows only) When PHP is talking to a SMTP server directly, if a full stop is found on the start of a line, it is removed. To counter-act this, replace these occurrences with a double dot.
    <?php
    $text = str_replace("\n.", "\n..", $text);
    ?>

Resources

• PHP Manual
• PHP Tutorial from w3schools

In Conclusion ...

Relatively speaking, I am a PHP amateur, and I welcome your feedback using the link below or the form on this page!

Fred