PHP Cookbook

17.1. Sending Mail

Problem

You want to send an email message. This can be in direct response to a user’s action, such as signing up for your site, or a recurring event at a set time, such as a weekly newsletter.

Solution

Use PEAR’s Mail class:

require 'Mail.php';

$to = '[e-mail]';

$headers['From'] = '[e-mail]';
$headers['Subject'] = 'New Version of PHP Released!';

$body = 'Go to http://www.php.net and download it today!';

$message =& Mail::factory('mail');
$message->send($to, $headers, $body);

If you can’t use PEAR’s Mail class, use PHP’s built-in mail( ) function:

$to = '[e-mail]';
$subject = 'New Version of PHP Released!';
$body = 'Go to http://www.php.net and download it today!';
  
mail($to, $subject, $body);

Discussion

PEAR’s Mail class allows you to send mail three ways. You indicate the method to use when instantiating a mail object with Mail::factory( ).

• To send mail using an external program such as sendmail or qmail, pass sendmail.

• To use an SMTP server, pass smtp.

• To use the built-in mail( ) function, pass mail. This tells Mail to apply the settings from your php.ini .

To use sendmail or smtp, you have to pass a second parameter indicating your settings. To use sendmail, specify a sendmail_path and sendmail_args:

$params['sendmail_path'] = '/usr/sbin/sendmail';
$params['sendmail_args'] = '-oi -t';

$message =& Mail::factory('sendmail', $params);

One good value for sendmail_path is /usr/lib/sendmail. Unfortunately, sendmail tends to jump around ...