Forum email address display issue - php

Question

I created a web forum with the script below. I am able to receive inquiries from my site; however, the visitor's email address is not showing in the email sent from the webmaster. I would like to have some guidance here to fix the problem.
Here is my PHP script:
<?php $name = $_POST['name'];
$email = $_POST['email'];
$message = $_POST['message'];
$formcontent="From: $name \n Message: $message";
$recipient = "abc#gmail.com";
$subject = "Contact Form";
mail($recipient, $subject, $formcontent) or die("Error!");
echo "Thank You!";
?>
Here is what I got from the webmaster:
From: xx
Message: xx
No email address listed in the email sent by the webmaster.
I found some similar scripts on the web with two additional rows:
$mailheader = "From: $email \r\n";
mail($recipient, $subject, $formcontent, $mailheader) or die("Error!");
This actually gives me an Error output.
How can I fix the issue?
Thanks!

Answer 1

The third parameter of mail() is just the actual body of the message, which you have saved as $message. The fourth variable is where you define the headers, and is where you define who the message is From. Note that you don't actually need to pass the message as a header, and as such, your variable $formcontent, shouldn't contain your From: header. However, you do need to provide carriage returns in the form of "\r\n" after the provided email address.
The modified code would look like this:
<?php
$name = $_POST['name'];
$email = $_POST['email'];
$message = $_POST['message'];
$formcontent = "From: $name" . "\r\n";
$recipient = "abc#gmail.com";
$subject = "Contact Form";
mail($recipient, $subject, $message, $formcontent) or die("Error!");
echo "Thank You!";
?>
Hope this helps! :)

Answer 2

You could add headers to the mail function.
$name = $_POST['name'];
$email = $_POST['email'];
$message = $_POST['message'];
$formcontent="From: $name \n Message: $message";
$recipient = "abc#gmail.com";
$subject = "Contact Form";
$headers = "MIME-Version: 1.0" . "\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-type:text/html;charset=UTF-8" . "\r\n";
$headers .= "From: <$email>" . "\r\n";
mail($recipient, $subject, $formcontent, $headers);
FYI - I would santize and validate all POST values before using them in this manner