ERROR! Message when submitting simple e-mail form. (PHP)

Question

Hi All

I just purchased a website template from DreamTemplate.com, and have tried to send a test e-mail from it online and instead of sending the e-mail it just comes up with red text saying: "ERROR!".

I am not very familiar with PHP, but I can understand the syntax. The code is below:

---

Contact.html

<script type="text/javascript">
// <![CDATA[
jQuery(document).ready(function(){
    $('#contactform').submit(function(){                  
        var action = $(this).attr('action');
        $.post(action, { 
            name: $('#name').val(),
            email: $('#email').val(),
            company: $('#company').val(),
            subject: $('#subject').val(),
            message: $('#message').val()
        },
            function(data){
                $('#contactform #submit').attr('disabled','');
                $('.response').remove();
                $('#contactform').before('<p class="response">'+data+'</p>');
                $('.response').slideDown();
                if(data=='Message sent!') $('#contactform').slideUp();
            }
        ); 
        return false;
    });
});
// ]]>
</script>

---

Contact.PHP

<?php

if(!$_POST) exit;

$email = $_POST['email'];


//$error[] = preg_match('/\b[A-Z0-9._%-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}\b/i', $_POST['email']) ? '' : 'INVALID EMAIL ADDRESS';
if(!eregi("^[a-z0-9]+([_\\.-][a-z0-9]+)*" ."@"."([a-z0-9]+([\.-][a-z0-9]+)*)+"."\\.[a-z]{2,}"."$",$email )){
    $error.="You've entered an invalid e-mail address.";
    $errors=1;
}
if($errors==1) echo $error;
else{
    $values = array ('name','email','message');
    $required = array('name','email','message');

    $your_email = "[email protected]";
    $email_subject = "New Message: ".$_POST['subject'];
    $email_content = "new message:\n";

    foreach($values as $key => $value){
      if(in_array($value,$required)){
        if ($key != 'subject' && $key != 'company') {
          if( empty($_POST[$value]) ) { echo 'PLEASE FILL IN REQUIRED FIELDS'; exit; }
        }
        $email_content .= $value.': '.$_POST[$value]."\n";
      }
    }

    if(@mail($your_email,$email_subject,$email_content)) {
        echo 'Message sent!'; 
    } else {
        echo 'ERROR!';
    }
}
?>

Can someone please help? I have no idea why this won't work. Any help at all is much appreciated.

Thank you

---

Update: As advised, I have removed the @ symbol before 'mail'. It is now displaying useful error messages:

"Warning: mail() [function.mail]: Failed to connect to mailserver at "localhost" port 25, verify your "SMTP" and "smtp_port" setting in php.ini or use ini_set() in E:\web\autoopti\contact.php on line 31 ERROR!"

Answer 1

Your code is failing to send the e-mail message. You need to debug the information that it's getting, so that you have a chance at figuring out what's going on.

First of all, remove the '@' before mail(...). The '@' suppresses (slowly) any errors that the mail() function is spitting out, which means you don't get the information you need to fix it. Ideally, if that function gets properly formed data, you won't have an error. The worst that can happen in that case is the e-mail address provided is malformed.

Then, I'd start debugging the data passed in. Use the echo() function to print out the values of $your_email, $email_subject and $email_content to make sure that they are properly formed. The echo() function is used like:

echo($your_email);
echo($email_subject);
echo($email_content);

You get the idea.

If that doesn't help, or if removing the '@' gives you some funkiness, post back with the error output. That'll help us help you more.

Answer 2

Posting another answer based on the OP's edit.

Are you running this on your local machine, or on another Windows server? You need to have a SMTP server running on the machine you're trying to execute mail() from. Please see these articles: One Two for basic instructions on setting up an SMTP server, or Google has the answers.

Quick explanation of what an SMTP server is and does: it's the mail relayer. The SMTP server implements the messaging protocols to route e-mails to their appropriate destination(s).

EDIT: If you feel like diving headfirst into PHP, and don't want to bother setting up a local SMTP server, you can use PHPMailer to use your ISP's or another remote SMTP server, where it's already configured for you. There's plenty of sample code out there.

Hope that helps!

Answer 3

Based on the error, it looks like your php.ini configuration for the smtp server is wrong.

You can test it by trying to run a simple PHP script:

<?php
mail("your_email", "Test", "test message")
?>

That removes any doubt about the data that get passed to your mail function.

Now, apart from that, there are a few quirks in your code:

Looking at your jQuery, I can see that you get the message by "val()". That doesn't work on a TextArea, if I remember it right, so it could be a problem if you are using a text area to get the message.

In the PHP code, I suspect this part doesn't work the way you expect it to:

$values = array ('name','email','message');
...
foreach($values as $key => $value){
      if(in_array($value,$required)){
        if ($key != 'subject' && $key != 'company') {
...

Your array specifies no keys, so internally, your array looks like:

[0]=>name;
[1]=>email...

So you end up with if ( 0 != 'subject' && 0 != 'company') {...

However that test is actually useless, because the previous line already makes sure that your value is in the required array, and since "subject" and "company" are not in the required array, that line will never be true.

At the moment, your contact.php does not use the data sent by the jQuery. I assume this is on purpose because you are just testing, right?

Another problem is that you do not validate your data at all. Your form could be used to send spam all over the place using your account. Is that because your function is still at the testing stage?