Send Email with PHP/AJAX From HTML Form - php

Question

I want to send the information the user has filled out from an HTML form to my email address. From my understanding, this cannot be done by using only client-side coding due to the nature of how emails work, and suggested to use PHP (combined with AJAX) to handle the server-side code. I followed the guide here but I am not receiving any emails at my email address. I am testing locally on my machine (using XAMPP) before I deploy my code on my client's web space (goDaddy). I want to note that I have never used PHP before.
Javascript:
var data = "This is my email";
$.ajax({
type: "POST",
url: "email.php",
data: data,
dataType: "text"
});
PHP (email.php):
<?php
$to = "myself#hotmail.com";
$subject = "This is my email";
$message = $_REQUEST;
$send = mail($to, $subject, $message);
if(!$send){
die();
}
?>

Answer 1

XAMPP doesn't have an e-mail sending thing by itself as default. You may check the links below;
php mail setup in xampp
How do I enable XAMPP to locally use the php's mail() function so I can test my mail() scripts locally without having to upload to my server?

Answer 2

You should replace $_REQUEST with $_REQUEST["data"] or something like this, because $_REQUEST is an array.

Answer 3

all time the page is being refreshed. Below is my code:
HTML 5:
<form method="post" data-ajax="false">
<input type="text" name="email" placeholder="jack#example.com, jil#example.com">
<input type="submit" name="submit" value="Invite" class="submitBtn">
</form>
JS:
$('form').bind('submit',function(){
$.ajax({
type : 'POST',
url : 'data/invite.php',
data : $(this).serialize(),
cache : false,
dataType: 'text',
success : function (serverResponse) { alert('mail sent successfully.'); },
error : function (jqXHR, textStatus, errorThrown) {alert('error sending mail');}
});
})
PHP:
<?php
$to = $_POST['mail'];
$name = 'Indusnet Technologies';
$subject = 'Think Recycle';
$text = 'Welcome to our site';
$message =' You received a mail from '.$name;
$message .='Text of the message : '.$text;
if(mail($to, $subject,$message)){
echo 'mail successful send';
}
else{
echo 'there’s some errors to send the mail, verify your server options';
}
?>

Answer 4

var data = "This is my email";
$.ajax({
type: "POST",
url: "email.php",
data: data,
dataType: "text"
});
This Code shoud be like this
var data = "This is my email";
$.ajax({
type: "POST",
url: "email.php",
data: {"data": data},
dataType: "text"
});
and get in code either through $_POST['data'] or $_REQUEST['data']

Answer 5

You probably should return false to the form. Try this:
$('form').submit(function(){
$.ajax({
type : 'POST',
url : 'data/invite.php',
data : $(this).serialize(),
cache : false,
dataType: 'text',
success : function (serverResponse) { alert('mail sent successfully.'); },
error : function (jqXHR, textStatus, errorThrown) {alert('error sending mail');}
});
return false;
})