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PHP E-mailing

PHP E-mailing

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paperclipmuffin
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20 Jul, 2009 - 11:14 PM

Post #1

Hi, and welcome to my tutorial.

Being able to send emails automatically is very useful. You can remind site users about something or notify them of an event.

IMPORTANT: THIS CODE IS NEVER TO BE USED FOR MALICIOUS PURPOSES, E.G SPAMMING.

First we shall make some code for sending a very simple email.
SYNTAX:

CODE

mail(<recipent>, <subject>, <message>);

In this example Alex is being notified that he needs to pay his bills:

CODE

mail("alex@somemail.com", "Bills", "You need to pay water bill today.");

But what if you want a changeable message? We'll add a number for his debt:

CODE

$debt;
$debt = 100;
mail("alex@somemail.com", "Bills", "You owe Faketown water " $debt);

That's all very good, but what if you want a user to be able to edit what goes in the email? We'll add a HTML form...

CODE

<form action="send.php" method="post">
From: <input type="text" name="fname" />
Subject: <input type="text" name="age" />
Body: <br />
<textarea name='message' rows='15' cols='40'>
</textarea><br />
<input type="submit" />
</form>

Then you would feed that into an email code like the ones you just learnt at send.php using $_post. This is great for customer feedback form, ect.

If you want to stop people spamming you through these form (which is a very good idea) you could add an image captcha from: reCAPTCHA. This link is not

Remember how earlier I told you about notifying users of a site about events? Well here is the bit that tells you about that. (P.S: For this bit you will need to know how to use MySQL.)

Let's say we want a user to be notified of a PM being sent to him/her. Once again we will use Alex as our example (he's probably getting a bit tired of this PHP stuff). We have a very simple PM form:

CODE

<form action="send.php" method="post">
Send a PM <br />
To: <input type="text" name="to">
Title: <input type="text" name="title">
Message: <br />
<textarea name='message' rows='15' cols='40'>
</textarea>
<input method="submit"/>
</form>

And then at send.php we have something neat:

CODE

//Here send a PM as normal
$main="You received a PM entitled: ";
$title=$_post["title"];
$recipient=//Here you will have to get the recipient email from a MySQL database;
$all=$main.$title; //Fuse the 2 together
mail($recipient, "New PM", $all);

And if you do that right, the PM recipient would receive an email something like:

QUOTE

You received a PM entitled: Your tut was not approved.

Cool!

Well, have fun, pay your bills, don't break your nose, wash the car, cook dinner and use PHP to send emails! Good luck!