I bought a simple website template with a php contact form. Everything works great with the one small exception of actually receiving the messages sent via the form. That is, the contact form would show a success message, but the message would never arrive.
After a long back and forth with my hosting service, I found out that in order to avoid spoofing they won't allow emails to be sent where the FROM address they don't host. That is, if a visitor to the site writes down his gmail/yahoo etc. in the form, I won't get it.
They suggested using the email address hosted with them as the FROM address, and having the visitor's input email as the REPLY-TO address. This seems reasonable.
So I dug around (e.g. here: PHP reply-to error - comes with admin email not sender of contact form and php Contact Form on website and reply-to email )
and the answers suggest something adding a headers component:
$headers = 'From: [email protected]' . "\r\n" .
'Reply-To: [email protected]' . "\r\n" .
'X-Mailer: PHP/' . phpversion();
and also add it to
mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);
so that's what I did. $email is defined in this template as what the visitor's email, so what I did was:
$subject = "Contact Form: $name";
$message = "$message";
$headers = 'From: myemail@my_domain.com' . "\r\n" .
'Reply-To: $email' . "\r\n" .
'X-Mailer: PHP/' . phpversion();
mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);
This is all nice and dandy but it still doesn't work well. Emails do go through now, but the details are:
from: myemail@my_domain.com via servername.hosting_company.com
**reply-to: [email protected]_company.com**
to: myemail@my_domain.com
so, the reply to address is still not what the visitor left.
Can you help me with this? Don't know what else I can do.
Many thanks!
if anyone is interested, here's the full php file:
<?php
// Clean up the input values
foreach($_POST as $key => $value) {
if(ini_get('magic_quotes_gpc'))
$_POST[$key] = stripslashes($_POST[$key]);
$_POST[$key] = htmlspecialchars(strip_tags($_POST[$key]));
}
// Assign the input values to variables for easy reference
$name = $_POST["name"];
$email = $_POST["email"];
$message = $_POST["message"];
// Test input values for errors
$errors = array();
if(strlen($name) < 2) {
if(!$name) {
$errors[] = "You must enter a name.";
} else {
$errors[] = "Name must be at least 2 characters.";
}
}
if(!$email) {
$errors[] = "You must enter an email.";
} else if(!validEmail($email)) {
$errors[] = "You must enter a valid email.";
}
if(strlen($message) < 10) {
if(!$message) {
$errors[] = "You must enter a message.";
} else {
$errors[] = "Message must be at least 10 characters.";
}
}
if($errors) {
// Output errors and die with a failure message
$errortext = "";
foreach($errors as $error) {
$errortext .= "<li>".$error."</li>";
}
die("<span class='failure'><h3>Sorry, The following errors occured:</h3><ol>". $errortext ."</ol><a href='contact.html' class='more'>Refresh Form</a></span>");
}
// --------------------------------------//
// Send the email // INSERT YOUR EMAIL HERE
$to = "myemail@my_domain.com";
// --------------------------------------//
$subject = "Contact Form: $name";
$message = "$message";
$headers = 'From: myemail@my_domain.com' . "\r\n" .
'Reply-To: $email' . "\r\n" .
'X-Mailer: PHP/' . phpversion();
mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);
// Die with a success message
die("<span class='success'><h3>Successfully Sent!</h3> Your message is on its way, we will respond to you shortly.</span>");
// A function that checks to see if
// an email is valid
function validEmail($email)
{
$isValid = true;
$atIndex = strrpos($email, "@");
if (is_bool($atIndex) && !$atIndex)
{
$isValid = false;
}
else
{
$domain = substr($email, $atIndex+1);
$local = substr($email, 0, $atIndex);
$localLen = strlen($local);
$domainLen = strlen($domain);
if ($localLen < 1 || $localLen > 64)
{
// local part length exceeded
$isValid = false;
}
else if ($domainLen < 1 || $domainLen > 255)
{
// domain part length exceeded
$isValid = false;
}
else if ($local[0] == '.' || $local[$localLen-1] == '.')
{
// local part starts or ends with '.'
$isValid = false;
}
else if (preg_match('/\\.\\./', $local))
{
// local part has two consecutive dots
$isValid = false;
}
else if (!preg_match('/^[A-Za-z0-9\\-\\.]+$/', $domain))
{
// character not valid in domain part
$isValid = false;
}
else if (preg_match('/\\.\\./', $domain))
{
// domain part has two consecutive dots
$isValid = false;
}
else if(!preg_match('/^(\\\\.|[A-Za-z0-9!#%&`_=\\/$\'*+?^{}|~.-])+$/',
str_replace("\\\\","",$local)))
{
// character not valid in local part unless
// local part is quoted
if (!preg_match('/^"(\\\\"|[^"])+"$/',
str_replace("\\\\","",$local)))
{
$isValid = false;
}
}
if ($isValid && !(checkdnsrr($domain,"MX") || checkdnsrr($domain,"A")))
{
// domain not found in DNS
$isValid = false;
}
}
return $isValid;
}
?>