Email form (PHP; post - send and message on same page) - php

Question

I have some issues regarding my contact form. I have tried several solutions and been reading Stack Overflow a lot... but as every code differs, I would need something unique for my solution. It should be quite simple though.
This is my "form page":
<form class="contact_form" action="send_form_email.php" method="post" name="contact_form">
<ul>
<li>
<label for="name">Namn:</label>
<input type="text" name="name" required />
</li>
<li>
<label for="email">E-post:</label>
<input type="text" name="email" required />
</li>
<li>
<label for="phone">Tfn:</label>
<input type="text" name="phone" required />
</li>
<li>
<label for="message">Meddelande:</label>
<textarea name="message" cols="40" rows="6" required ></textarea>
</li>
<li>
<button class="submit" type="submit">Skicka</button>
</li>
</ul>
</form>
Today I am using a post function to post a "success message" on the same page. But I can not make it work with any solution tried. Validation is already built in CSS3. What I need is to send an email with the form (which have worked, but then the message and validation pops up on a new page) and a message to appear on the same page (This is not working, no matter what I try).
Help?

Answer 1

The Windows implementation of mail() differs in many ways from the Unix implementation. First, it doesn't use a local binary for composing messages but only operates on direct sockets which means a MTA is needed listening on a network socket (which can either on the localhost or a remote machine).
Second, the custom headers like From:, Cc:, Bcc: and Date: are not interpreted by the MTA in the first place, but are parsed by PHP.
As such, the to parameter should not be an address in the form of "Something ". The mail command may not parse this properly while talking with the MTA.
Note:
It is worth noting that the mail() function is not suitable for larger volumes of email in a loop. This function opens and closes an SMTP socket for each email, which is not very efficient.
For the sending of large amounts of email, see the » PEAR::Mail, and » PEAR::Mail_Queue packages.
Note:
The following RFCs may be useful: » RFC 1896, » RFC 2045, » RFC 2046, » RFC 2047, » RFC 2048, » RFC 2049, and » RFC 2822.
You can write clean PHP code while creating the headers correctly. First, build a list of all headers in an array. Then, glue them with "\r\n" character.
This code now looks clean and straight forward.
(Just compare it with your code )
<?php
$headers = array();
$headers[] = "MIME-Version: 1.0";
$headers[] = "Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1";
$headers[] = "From: Sender Name <sender#domain.com>";
$headers[] = "Bcc: JJ Chong <bcc#domain2.com>";
$headers[] = "Reply-To: Recipient Name <receiver#domain3.com>";
$headers[] = "Subject: {$subject}";
$headers[] = "X-Mailer: PHP/".phpversion();
mail($to, $subject, $email, implode("\r\n", $headers));
?>
As noted in other, well, notes; the "additional headers" parameter can be easily exploited, when doing things like:
<?php
mail( $_POST['to'], $_POST['subject'], $_POST['message'], 'Reply-to: '.$_POST['from']."\r\n" );
?>
An easy way of fixing this, is removing CRLFs from the header-strings, like so:
<?php
$_POST['from'] = str_replace( "\r\n", '', $_POST['from'] );
?>
This way, the extra data will be part of the previous header.
There is also imap_mail used to send an email message.
This link will be much useful: http://php.net/manual/en/function.imap-mail.php

Answer 2

There's multiple solution for your problem depending on how you handle your post in PHP.
For pure PHP/HTML my solution would be,
In send_form_email.php set the message you want to display in session
Then, do a header location to the PHP page where you want to display the message
In this PHP check if the session variable is set and if it does, display it in HTML
It would look like that
send_form_email.php
if ( some_error )
$_SESSION['msg'] = 'Some error message';
else
$_SESSION['msg'] = 'Success !!';
header('Location: http://www.example.com/');
some_other_file.php
if (isset($_SESSION['msg']))
echo $_SESSION['msg']; // or add it to a variable for late use in your HTML
Another solution would be to sent the form using Ajax to your php file, then display the response from your file (the message) into a block in your HTLM page.