The mail() function allows you to send emails directly from a script. The parameters of this function are as follows:

Copy and paste this simple HTML code to a webpage and save it as form.html. It basically is the form, very simple. It has E-mail, Subject and Message.

Let's get interactive with surfers again. I'd like to create a form mail system in PHP. First we need to create a form in HTML to gather the information. I am going to use one similar to my Perl form mailer script, because it looks clean.

If you've been on the web at all, you've gone through multipart forms, where you fill out, let's say, section one, click submit, and fill in section two, etc.. This makes sense from dividing the forms into chunks, controlling the amount of information received, and also for verfication. If we want the user to set up an account with us, we might want to make sure that the username and password they select are unique before we have them fill out much else.

The validation of data that has been entered in a form is necessary in most cases. Why is important? For example, what good is holding a contest or sweepstakes if you can't notify the winner, because he or she entered an invalid telephone number or an incorrect address. What good is having a mailing list if the e-mail addresses on it aren't verified, and your mailing list just bounces back to you without reaching the subscribers and target audience.Validating form entries saves you time and more importantly, it can save you money. And since somebody embossed the slogan "Time is money!", this should be very important for your web site!Well when should we validate? There are two types of validation; client side and server side.For reference, client side means that you are depending on what browser the user is currently using. On the client side, validation is performed using JavaScript. And that can be very tricky, because some users turn off JavaScript support in their browsers before they even come to your site. If you encounter of one those users, client side validation won't help you much if you try to verify data from a form because your JavaScript code will not be executed or interpreted by the browser, means you are back to square 1. Remember, the winner of your competition entered a wrong address.This is where server side validation comes in handy. It will always work, no matter what. Of course assuming that you have access to the technology on your server. Server side validation can be done with Perl, PHP, ASP, ColdFusion, JSP and almost any other scripting language. For this tutorial, I'll use PHP. A quite popular and easy to master server side scripting language.