Extra characters in PHP email "from" field - php

Question

I'm trying to send email from PHP, and although it's working, I'm noticing that I'm getting a lot of extra stuff in the "from" part of the email. The extra stuff, I'm assuming, is
information from my server?
For example, if $from = "myname", instead of "myname" only coming through in the email from field as is, I get something like:
myname#p3nlhg.phx3.secureserver.net
Here is my PHP I'm playing with, the important part being my $from var:
$from = "myname";
mail($to,$formSubj,$formMssg,$from);
Honestly that's all I have, nothing more or less (as far as the $from is concerned). How can I clean this up or make it so that only the plain value of $from, which is in this case "myname", comes out?

Answer 1

The 4th parameter of the mail function doesn't work this way. It expect header information. To achieve what you want to do use:
$header = "From: myname <no-reply#test.com> \r\n";
mail($to,$formSubj,$formMssg,$header);
You shouldn't use a lonely myname either. You need a valid email addess string: myname <no-reply#test.com> or no-reply#test.com. If you just put myname, PHP will try to interpret it as an email address. That's why you're getting myname#p3nlhg.phx3.secureserver.net. p3nlhg.phx3.secureserver.net must be the hostname of your server.
A nice thing about the header parameter is that you can use it to specify other less common fields. e.g.:
$headers = 'MIME-Version: 1.0' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'From: Birthday Reminder <birthday#example.com>' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'Cc: birthdayarchive#example.com' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'Bcc: birthdaycheck#example.com' . "\r\n";
Notice that you need to place a carriage-return/line-feed (\r\n) at the end of each header attribute. A simple line feed will not work.

Answer 2

According to the mail documentation, you're using $from as the $additional_headers argument.
Instead, change $from to an appropriate header. For example,
$from = "myname";
$headers = "From: $from <user#example.com>";
mail($to, $formSubj, $formMssg, $headers);
According to the documentation for additional_headers,
When sending mail, the mail must contain a From header. This can be set with the additional_headers parameter, or a default can be set in php.ini.
Failing to do this will result in an error message similar to Warning: mail(): "sendmail_from" not set in php.ini or custom "From:" header missing. The From header sets also Return-Path under Windows.

Answer 3

It's coming from the mail server that you have installed in your server, try to switch to another one, like postfix, courier or someting else.