sendmail.php file isnt working right? - php

Question

so I'm new at this website stuff and im doing at part of my uni course, my tearcher gave me the code.
This in my code for my sendmail.php I tested my contact form on my website and I get the 'Failure!' message that is in the code but that is all I get, nothing else.
when it was working I would get the email but know information that was put in to the contact form and I haven't change the coding. could someone please help me? Thank you
<?php
/*Here you are going to declare the variables*/
$name = $_POST['name'];
$email = $_POST['email'];
$message = $_POST['message'];
//Save visitor name and entered message into one variable:
$formcontent="VISITOR NAME: $name\\n\\nFEEDBACK: $message";
$recipient = "denisedaykinphotography#gmail.com";
$subject = "Contact Form";
$mailheader = "From: $email\\r\\n";
$mailheader .= "Reply-To: $email\\r\\n";
$mailheader .= "MIME-Version: 1.0\\r\\n";
mail($recipient, $subject, $formcontent, $mailheader) or die("Failure!");
echo "Thank You!";
?>

Answer 1

Keep your $variables outside of "strings".
meaning:
$name = "Bob";
"hello $name" != "hello " . $name;

Answer 2

It is highly likely that hosting/your computer where the script is put at the moment doesn't support sending mails.
If this is your computer, you could put use to this answer I provided in a similar thread and setting up your own SMTP server (that is the service responsible for sending emails), or using a free one from Internet.
If this is not your computer and you can not really change configs/server configuration, etc., then I suggest you to move the script somewhere else.

Answer 3

The value of variable $mailheader is wrong. Now, an echo($mailheader) displays something like:
From: user#example.org\r\nReply-To: user#example.org\r\nMIME-Version: 1.0\r\n
which is wrong.
The header lines must be separated by the <CR><LF> pair of characters, i.e. the characters having the codes 13 and 10. Because they are not printable, in PHP double-quoted strings these characters are encoded as "\r" and "\n".
The same remark about the content of you message.
Regarding this issue, the code should look like this:
$formcontent = "VISITOR NAME: $name\n\nFEEDBACK: $message";
$recipient = "denisedaykinphotography#gmail.com";
$subject = "Contact Form";
$mailheader = "From: $email\r\n";
$mailheader .= "Reply-To: $email\r\n";
$mailheader .= "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
These answer does not really address your problem of mails not being sent but, before checking the PHP configuration and other mail-related issues, make sure the values you provide to PHP mail() function are correctly formatted (as explained above).