Advanced email in PHP

I wish I could remember the very first email message I ever sent. Unfortunately, the truth is that I've come to take email for granted; for instance, I easily send more email messages than I make phone calls. Because the novelty has long since worn off, the memory of that first email is as lost to me as my first phone call; but I doubt my sense of wonder was any less complete at the time. To someone who has never seen email in action before, that first message can be magical.

In this article, I'll try to recapture some of that magic for those of you who have never created a Web site that sends email messages. We'll see how the PHP server-side scripting language may be set up to send email, and explore how to send complex message types such as HTML email or emails with file attachments.

Note: This article was written back when things like HTML email and file attachments were a lot more difficult to do in PHP than they are today. Before you dive into the from-scratch solutions presented in this article, you might consider investigating PHPMailer, a free library for PHP that provides all of these features with minimal hair-pulling and gnashing of teeth.

PHP Email Setup

Before we can send email with PHP, we need to set it up to do so, just as you need to set up your email program before it can send messages. Configuration for sending email in PHP is done with the php.ini file, so open up your Web server's php.ini in whichever editor you normally use.

If you don't run your own server, but instead have a PHP-equipped Web host, you can safely assume that everything in this section has been done for you, and skip ahead.

In the section entitled [mail function] in the php.ini file, you'll find three settings: SMTP, sendmail_from, and sendmail_path. If your server runs on a Windows machine, you'll want to set the SMTP option to point to your SMTP server (or your ISP's SMTP server, if you're setting up PHP on your home machine). If instead you're setting up PHP on a Linux (or other Unix-based OS) server, you'll want to set the sendmail_path option to point to the sendmail program on your server, passing it the -t option. You can use the SMTP option in Linux instead if you don't have sendmail set up.

In either case, you'll want to set the sendmail_from option to your email address, or whichever address you'd like to appear as the default 'from' address for emails sent from PHP scripts.

Here's how the section might look on a typical Windows server, or on a Linux server without sendmail:

[mail function]
; Setup for Windows systems
SMTP = smtp.my.isp.net
sendmail_from = me@myserver.com

And here's how it might look on a Linux server with sendmail:

[mail function]
; Setup for Linux systems
sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t
sendmail_from = me@myserver.com

With those settings in place, restart your Web server and you're ready to go!