Problems with sending contact form to personal email - php

Question

I am trying to make a contact form using HTML and PHP. The PHP for the form is below:
<?php
if(isset($_POST['email'])) {
// Email to information
$email_to ="personalemail#email.com";
$email_subject ="Contact";
$email_from ="Person";
// Error code
function died($error) {
echo "We are sorry, but there were error(s) found with the form you submitted.";
echo "These errors appear below.<br/><br/>";
echo $error. "<br/><br/>";
echo "Please go back and fix these errors.<br/>";
die();
}
// Validation
if(!isset($_POST['fname']) || !isset($_POST['lname']) || !isset($_POST['email']) || !isset($_POST['message'])) {
died('We are sorry but there appears to be a problem with the form you submitted.');
}
$fname = $_POST['fname'];
$lname = $_POST['lname'];
$email = $_POST['email'];
$message = $_POST['message'];
$error_message = "";
if(!filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)) {
$error_message .= 'The email address you entered does not appear to be valid.<br/>';
}
$string_exp = "/^[A-Za-z.'-]+$/";
if(!preg_match($string_exp, $fname)) {
$error_message .= 'The first name you entered does not appear to be valid.<br/>';
}
if(!preg_match($string_exp, $lname)) {
$error_message .= 'The last name you entered does not appear to be valid.<br/>';
}
if(strlen($message) < 2) {
$error_message .= 'The message you entered does not appear to be valid.<br/>';
}
if(strlen($error_message) > 0) {
died($error_message);
}
$email_message = "Form details below.\n\n";
function clean_string($string) {
$bad = array("content-type", "bcc:", "to:", "cc:", "href");
return str_replace($bad, "", $string);
}
$email_message .= "Name:" . clean_string($fname) . clean_string($lname) . "\n";
$email_message .= "Email:" . clean_string($email) . "\n";
$email_message .= "Message:" . clean_string($message) . "\n";
// Create email headers
$headers = 'From: ' .$email_From . "\r\n". 'Reply-To:' . $email. "\r\n" . 'X-Mailer: PHP/' . phpversion();
mail($email_to, $email_subject, $email_message, $headers);
?>
Thankyou for contacting me. I will be in contact with you shortly. <br/>
Please click here to go back to the main website
<?php
}
?>
The issue is that when the form is submitted, it never sends an email to my own personal email. Is there something more I have to set up with the web hosting or is the problem purely in the code? I did some research about the appropriate code to put in and have tried many different options but none seem to work.

Answer 1

Forms that send email are errorprone, and worse yet, if something goes wrong neither you nor the end user usually get an error message. They will just think your customer service is not responding. Things that do go wrong: webserver email server down or malconfigured, recieving mailbox full, spamfilter eat email, rules on webserver's emailserver change and throws away your mails.
I recommend a cloud hosted form, that stores the form submissions and notify you by email, but email is not the primary data storage.
Something like this perhaps, has a free plan:
http://www.wufoo.com/features/