Page 536 - Beginning PHP 5.3

Part III: Using PHP in Practice
At a minimum, mail() requires three arguments:

❑ A string containing the recipient ’ s email address (or a comma - separated list of email addresses if
sending to multiple recipients)
❑ The email subject line, as a string
❑ The message body, as a string

mail() returns true if the mail was accepted for delivery by the mail server, or false if there was a
problem. (Note that an email message might still eventually bounce, even if the mail server accepted it
for delivery.)

For example, the following code sends a short email entitled “ Hello ”, with a message body of “ Hi Jim,
how are you? ”, to jim@example.com:

mail( “jim@example.com”, “Hello”, “Hi Jim, how are you?” );

You can also include the recipient ’ s real name in the recipient string, provided you follow it with the
recipient ’ s email address in angle brackets. For example:

mail( “Jim Smith < jim@example.com > ”, “Hello”, “Hi Jim, how are you?” );
To send a multi - line message, pass in a string that contains newline characters. Here ’ s an example:

$message = “Hi Jim,
How are you?
“;

mail( “Jim Smith < jim@example.com > ”, “Hello”, $message );

Lines of text in an email message body should not exceed 70 characters in length. To ensure that your
lines are of the correct length you can use PHP ’ s wordwrap() function:

$message = wordwrap( $message, 70 );

Specifying the Sender Address and Adding Headers

By default, when running on a Unix server such as Linux or Mac OS X, mail() usually sends messages
from the Web server ’ s username, such as “ www ” or “ www - data ”. (On Windows servers you need to
specify a default “ from ” address with the sendmail_from option in the php.ini configuration file.) If
you want to send your email from a different “ from ” address, you can specify the address in a fourth
argument to mail() , as follows:

mail( “Jim Smith < jim@example.com > ”, “Hello”, $message, “From: Bob Jones
< bob@example.com > ” );

This fourth argument lets you specify additional headers to include in the mail message. In this case, just
one header was added — the From: header — but you can add as many headers as you like. Just make
sure you separate each header by both a carriage return ( \r ) and line feed ( \n ) character; this is required
by the specification for Internet email messages:

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