Form mail: User defines recipient in form

UNarmed · January 28 '10, 04:02 AM (#1)

Hey i need to setup some sort of form mailer but with one distinct difference. Instead of the recipient being predefined i need something that allows the user to define the recipient of the email in the form itself.

In a nutshell ... the bellows is a example of the form.

Name: Bob
E-mail: Bob@gmail.com (the form results should be mailed to this address)
Text: Random banter!

Help would be greatly appreciated!

**mlseim** · January 28 '10, 08:25 AM (#2)

That's easy to do (unless your webhost is GoDaddy).

But ...

What precautions will you take to keep spammers from using your form
to mass email people using your website? That's the problem with doing
what you want to do. It's sort of a dangerous thing that could end-up getting
your webhost to close or suspend your account.

UNarmed · January 28 '10, 10:54 AM (#3)

Thanks for the reply, il sort that out later ... first i would just like to get the thing working. The host is Dataflame. If you could please elaborate how i would go about doing this it would realy help me. I have been searching the web for the entire day and i have come up dry =/

UNarmed · January 28 '10, 10:57 AM (#4)

I thought about using FormMail.pl for this but it turns out that it can only e-mail the form results to e-mail accounts hosted by the server and that dosent help me one bit =/

**mlseim** · January 28 '10, 12:24 PM (#5)

The restriction to email only by account hosted is a function of the webhost.
If Dataflame has that limitation (like GoDaddy), you won't be able to do it with PHP either.

You can test it out though ...

Copy and paste this script as "email.php", and try different recipients ... see what happens:

PHP Code:


			
<?php



$recipient = "youremailaddress@aol.com";

$subject = "This is an email test";

$sender = "whosenttheemail@aol.com";



$content="This is a test to see if you can send an email to anyone.";



$message = "

This is an email test

--------------------------------------------------

Email from:  $sender



$content

---------------------------------------------------

";



$extraheaders = "From: $sender\nReply-To: $sender\n\n";



if (! mail($recipient, $subject, $message, $extraheaders))

  echo "Mail did not send for some reason.";



echo "Email Sent";

?>

UNarmed · January 29 '10, 02:44 AM (#6)

Much thanks i will give this a try =]

UNarmed · January 29 '10, 03:04 AM (#7)

Ok great that worked =D now what is the nexy step? I really appreciated the help mlseim!

UNarmed · January 29 '10, 09:57 AM (#8)

Ah ok i got something working, this is probebly super bad haha but its my first time working with php.

PHP Code:


			
<?php

$recipient = $_POST["recipient"];
$subject = "This is an email test";
$sender = "salmon@electric-heart.com";
$field1 = $_POST["field1"];

$content="This is a test to see if you can send an email to anyone.";

$message = "
This is an email test 2 $field1
--------------------------------------------------
Email from:  $sender

$content
---------------------------------------------------
";

$extraheaders = "From: $sender\nReply-To: $sender\n\n";

if (! mail($recipient, $subject, $message, $extraheaders))
  echo "Mail did not send for some reason.";

echo "Email Sent";
?>

HTML Code:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Untitled Document</title>
</head>

<body>
<form action="mail.php" method="POST" name="contact" id="contact">
   e-mail: <input type="test" name="recipient" value=""><br/>
   first field: <input name="field1" type="text"><br/>
 <input name="Submit" type="submit" value="Submit"></td>

</form>
</body>
</html>

Ok thus far this is working, which i am super happy about haha =D

I need to place some HTML formating and the values from the form in the e-mail that is sent to the recipient. If you could give me a hint of how i would go about this i would realy appreciate it =D

UNarmed · January 29 '10, 10:44 AM (#9)

Ok nevermind i have it all working =] Thanks for giving me the start i needed and all the help!

PHP Code:


			
<?php
// recipient
$recipient = $_POST["recipient"];
// subject
$subject = "This is an email test";
$sender = "salmon@electric-heart.com";
$field1 = $_POST["field1"];

$content="This is a test to see if you can send an email to anyone.";
// message
$message = "
<html>
<head>
</head>

</body>
</html>
";

// To send HTML mail, the Content-type header must be set
$headers  = 'MIME-Version: 1.0' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' . "\r\n";

// Additional headers
$headers .= 'To: Mary <mary@example.com>, Kelly <kelly@example.com>' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'From: Birthday Reminder <birthday@example.com>' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'Cc: birthdayarchive@example.com' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'Bcc: birthdaycheck@example.com' . "\r\n";

$extraheaders = "From: $sender\nReply-To: $sender\n\n";

if (! mail($recipient, $subject, $message, $headers))
  echo "Mail did not send for some reason.";

echo "Email Sent";
?> 
<html>
<body>
<br />First field: <?php echo $_POST["field1"]; ?>
</body>
</html>