php simple contact form not sending mail even after confirmation...

Question

Hi

I have been trying to get a php contact form working on my portfolio site (currently on a free megabyet.net account), but on testing it(on the uploaded site) even though i get the thankyou/confirmation message, I still don't receive any message on my mail account (specified in the code), I can't seem to understand the problem here....help needed!

can it be something related to SMTP??

---

Here's the code :

<?php
if(isset($_POST['submit'])) {

$to = "[email protected]";
$subject = "Portfolio Contact";
$name_field = $_POST['name'];
$email_field = $_POST['email'];
$message = $_POST['message'];
$headers = "From: $email_field";
$body = "From: $name_field\n E-Mail: $email_field\n Message:\n $message";

echo "Mail has been sent, thankyou!";
mail($to, $subject, $body, $headers);

} else {

echo "blarg!";

}
?>

HTML Code:

<form id="contact_frm" action="mail.php" method="POST">
<h4>Name :</h4>
<input type="text" id="f_name" name="name"/><br/><br/>
<h4>E-Mail Address :</h4>
<input type="text" id="f_email" name="email"/><br/><br/>
<h4>Message :</h4>
<textarea id="f_msg" name="message" cols="22" rows="5"/></textarea><br/><br/>
<input id="send_btn" type="submit" value="Send >>" name="submit" /><br/>
</form>

---

Answer 1

Firstly you should be checking if mail() returns true or not to determine if mail has been sent successfully:

<?php
if(isset($_POST['submit'])) {

    $to = "[email protected]";
    $subject = "Portfolio Contact";
    $name_field = $_POST['name'];
    $email_field = $_POST['email'];
    $message = $_POST['message'];
    $headers = "From: $email_field";
    $body = "From: $name_field\n E-Mail: $email_field\n Message:\n $message";

    $success = mail($to, $subject, $body, $headers);
    if ($success) {
        echo "Mail has been sent, thankyou!";
        // redirect to thank you page here
    }
    else {
        echo "message failed";
    }
} else {

echo "blarg!";

}
?>

Try that and let us know if that works.

Also, have you tried sending to a different email address? It may be that Yahoo is blocking that web host for spam. Being a free host it is a very likely scenario.

Answer 2

Hello,

If you are looking for something related to sending email via SMTP. I would recommend you use Code Igniters mailer class.

http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/libraries/email.html

This also allows for debugging and handling SMTP errors gracefully.

Answer 3

can it be something related to SMTP??

Probably. Why don't you check your mailq and the log files from your MTA?

Answer 4

@John .. checked with that if condition with the code below and i get a failed output =/ ...so my mail() function is returning false =( ...and yea i've tried gmail but with the mail function not running fine on the first place.... it doesn't work...

<?php
if(isset($_POST['submit'])) {

$to = "[email protected]";
$subject = "Portfolio Contact";
$name_field = $_POST['name'];
$email_field = $_POST['email'];
$message = $_POST['message'];
$headers = "From: $email_field";
$body = "From: $name_field\n E-Mail: $email_field\n Message:\n $message";

$success = mail($to, $subject, $body, $headers);

if($success) { 
 echo "Mail has been sent, thankyou!";

} else {
 echo "message sending failed!";
 }
} else {
 echo "blarg!";
 }
?>

output- message sending failed!

so, do I need to define some extra params here?...also i saw that my host has given the path to sendmail as -- /usr/sbin/sendmail does it has anything to do with my mail function acting bad?...i mean do I need to define the sendmail param in it?

@unknown- hmm codeigniter may help, but i've never used it before...let's see...

@symcbean- sorry i don't know how to do that :P...probabaly cuz i'm not very well versed with SMTP yet?.... still a learner/beginner...

Answer 5

If the E-Mail goes out correctly, but never arrives, it could be that it gets caught by a spam filter. A few bullet points I wrote in reply to an similar question a few months ago:

• Does the sender address ("From") belong to a domain on your server? If not, make it so.
• Is your server on a blacklist (e.g. check IP on spamhaus.org)? This is a remote possibility with shared hosting.
• Are mails filtered by a spam filter? Open an account with a freemailer that has a spam folder and find out. Also, try sending mail to an address without a spam filter.
• Do you possibly need the fifth parameter "-f" of mail() to add a sender address? (See mail() command in the PHP manual)
• If you have access to log files, check those, of course, as suggested above.
• Do you check the "from:" address for possible bounce mails ("Returned to sender")? You can also set up a separate "errors-to" address.