PHP mail function doesn t complete sending of e-mail

Question

lt  php      name     POST  name         email     POST  email         message     POST  message         from    From  yoursite com        to    contact yoursite com        subject    Customer Inquiry        body    From   name n E-Mail   email n Message  n  message        if    POST  submit              if  mail   to   subject   body   from                 echo   lt p gt Your message has been sent  lt  p gt              else               echo   lt p gt Something went wrong  go back and try again  lt  p gt                      gt    I ve tried creating a simple mail form  The form itself is on my index html page  but it submits to a separate  thank you for your submission  page  thankyou php  where the above PHP code is embedded  The code submits perfectly  but never sends an email  How can I fix this

User · Answer

If you re having trouble sending mails with PHP  consider an alternative like PHPMailer or SwiftMailer  I usually use SwiftMailer whenever I need to send mails with PHP   Basic usage  require  mail swift required php     message   Swift Message  newInstance          The subject of your email     - gt setSubject  Jane Doe sends you a message          The from address es      - gt setFrom array  jane doe gmail com    gt   Jane Doe           The to address es      - gt setTo array  frank stevens gmail com    gt   Frank Stevens           Here  you put the content of your email     - gt setBody   lt h3 gt New message lt  h3 gt  lt p gt Here goes the rest of my message lt  p gt     text html     if  Swift Mailer  newInstance Swift MailTransport  newInstance   - gt send  message         echo json encode            quot status quot    gt   quot OK quot            quot message quot    gt   Your message has been sent          JSON PRETTY PRINT     else       echo json encode            quot status quot    gt   quot error quot            quot message quot    gt   Oops  Something went wrong          JSON PRETTY PRINT      See the official documentation for more information on how to use SwiftMailer

User · Answer

This will only affect a small handful of users  but I d like it documented for that small handful   This member of that small handful spent 6 hours troubleshooting a working PHP mail script because of this issue     If you re going to a university that runs XAMPP from www AceITLab com  you should know what our professor didn t tell us  The AceITLab firewall  not the Windows firewall  blocks MercuryMail in XAMPP   You ll have to use an alternative mail client  pear is working for us   You ll have to send to a Gmail account with low security settings     Yes  I know  this is totally useless for real world email   However  from what I ve seen  academic settings and the real world often have precious little in common

User · Answer

If you only use the mail  function  you need to complete the configuration file   You need to open the mail expansion  and set the SMTP  smtp port and so on  and most important  your username and your password  Without that  mail cannot be sent  Also  you can use the PHPMail class to send

User · Answer

Try this   if    POST  submit           success  mail  to   subject   body   from       if  success                 echo            lt p gt Your message has been sent  lt  p gt                   else            echo            lt p gt Something went wrong  go back and try again  lt  p gt

User · Answer

Sendmail installation for Debian 10 0 0   Buster   was in fact trivial   php ini   mail function  sendmail path  usr sbin sendmail -t -i    Other directives are mostly windows    Standard sendmail package install  allowing  send     su -                                          Install as user  root  dpkg --list                                   Is install necessary  apt-get install sendmail sendmail-cf m4       Note multiple package selection sendmailconfig                                Respond all  Y  for new install   Miscellaneous useful commands   which sendmail                                 usr sbin sendmail which sendmailconfig                           usr sbin sendmailconfig man sendmail                                  Documentation systemctl restart sendmail                    As and when required   Verification  of ability to send   echo  Subject  sendmail test    sendmail -v  lt yourEmail gt  gmail com   The above took about 5 minutes  Then I wasted 5 hours    Don t forget to check your spam folder

User · Answer

If you are running this code on a local server  i e your computer for development purposes  it won t send the email to the recipient  It will create a  txt file in a folder named mailoutput   In the case if you are using a free hosing service  like 000webhost or hostinger  those service providers disable the mail   function to prevent unintended uses of email spoofing  spamming  etc  I prefer you to contact them to see whether they support this feature   If you are sure that the service provider supports the mail   function  you can check this PHP manual for further reference   PHP mail    To check weather your hosting service support the mail   function  try running this code  remember to change the recipient email address     lt  php      to         nobody example com        subject    the subject        message    hello        headers    From  webmaster example com      r n             Reply-To  webmaster example com      r n             X-Mailer  PHP     phpversion         mail  to   subject   message   headers     gt

User · Answer

If you are using an SMTP configuration for sending your email  try using PHPMailer instead  You can download the library from https   github com PHPMailer PHPMailer   I created my email sending this way   function send mail  email   recipient name   message           require  phpmailer class phpmailer php          mail   new PHPMailer          mail- gt CharSet    utf-8        mail- gt IsSMTP                                            Set mailer to use SMTP      mail- gt Host    mail example com       Specify main and backup server      mail- gt SMTPAuth   true         Turn on SMTP authentication      mail- gt Username    myusername       SMTP username      mail- gt Password    p ssw0rd      SMTP password       mail- gt From    me walalang com        mail- gt FromName    System-Ad        mail- gt AddAddress  email   recipient name         mail- gt WordWrap   50                                     Set word wrap to 50 characters      mail- gt IsHTML true                                       Set email format to HTML  true  or plain text  false        mail- gt Subject    This is a Sampleenter code here Email        mail- gt Body       message       mail- gt AltBody    This is the body in plain text for non-HTML mail clients        mail- gt AddEmbeddedImage  images logo png    logo    logo png         mail- gt addAttachment  files file xlsx         if   mail- gt Send                 echo  Message could not be sent   lt p gt           echo  Mailer Error       mail- gt ErrorInfo         exit             echo  Message has been sent

User · Answer

You can use config email by CodeIgniter  For example  using SMTP   simple way     config   Array           protocol    gt   smtp            smtp host    gt   mail domain com      Your SMTP host          smtp port    gt  26     Default port for SMTP          smtp user    gt   name domain com            smtp pass    gt   password            mailtype    gt   html            charset    gt   iso-8859-1            wordwrap    gt  TRUE     message    Your msg    this- gt load- gt library  email    config    this- gt email- gt from  name domain com    Title     this- gt email- gt to  emaildestination domain com     this- gt email- gt subject  Header     this- gt email- gt message  message    if  this- gt email- gt send             Conditional true     It works for me

User · Answer

It may be a problem with  quot From  quot   email address in this part of the  headers  From    quot  name  quot   lt  email gt   To try it out  send an email without the headers part  like  mail  user example com    subject   message     If that is a case  try using an email account that is already created at the system you are trying to send mail from

User · Answer

There are several possibilities    You re facing a server problem  The server does not have any mail server   So your mail is not working  because your code is fine and mail is working with type  You are not getting the posted value  Try your code with a static value  Use SMTP mails to send mail

User · Answer

For sending emails from gmail smtp and using php mail function  First you have to setup the sendmail in your local machine  Once it is set it mean you have setup your local smtp server  you will then be able to send emails from the account you set in your sendmail smtp account  in my case I followed the instructions from https   www developerfiles com how-to-send-emails-from-localhost-mac-os-x-el-capitan  and was able to setup the account

User · Answer

Just add some headers before sending mail    lt  php   name     POST  name     email     POST  email     message     POST  message     from    From  yoursite com     to    contact yoursite com     subject    Customer Inquiry    body    From   name n E-Mail   email n Message  n  message     headers     MIME-Version  1 0 r n    headers     Content-type  text html r n    headers     From  from example com      r n     Reply-To  reply example com      r n     X-Mailer  PHP     phpversion     mail  to   subject   message   headers     And one more thing  The mail   function is not working in localhost  Upload your code to a server and try

User · Answer

For those who do not want to use external mailers and want to mail   on a dedicated Linux server   The way  how PHP mails  is described in php ini in section  mail function    Parameter sendmail-path describes how sendmail is called  The default value is sendmail -t -i  so if you get a working sendmail -t -i  lt  message txt in the Linux console - you will be done  You could also add mail log to debug and be sure mail   is really called   Different MTAs can implement sendmail  They just make a symbolic link to their binaries on that name  For example  in Debian the default is Postfix  Configure your MTA to send mail and test it from the console with sendmail -v -t -i  lt  message txt  File message txt should contain all headers of a message and a body  destination address for the envelope will be taken from the To  header  Example   From  myapp example com To  mymail example com Subject  Test mail via sendmail   Text body    I prefer to use ssmtp as MTA because it is simple and does not require running a daemon with opened ports  ssmtp fits only for sending mail from localhost  It also can send authenticated email via your account on a public mail service  Install ssmtp and edit configuration file  etc ssmtp ssmtp conf  To be able also to receive local system mail to Unix  accounts  alerts to root from cron jobs  for example  configure  etc ssmtp revaliases file   Here is my configuration for my account on Yandex mail   root mymail example com mailhub smtp yandex ru 465 FromLineOverride YES UseTLS YES AuthUser abcde yandex ru AuthPass password

User · Answer

If you re stuck with an app hosted on Hostgator  this is what solved my problem  Thanks a lot to the guy who posted the detailed solution  In case the link goes offline one day  there you have the summary   Look for the sendmail path in your server  A simple way to check it  is to temporarily write the following code in a page which only you will access  to read the generated info   lt  php phpinfo      gt   Open this page  and look for sendmail path   Then  don t forget to remove this code   Problem and fix  if your sendmail path is saying only -t -i  then edit your server s php ini and add the following line  sendmail path    usr sbin sendmail -t -i   But  after being able to send mail with PHP mail   function  I learned that it sends not authenticated email  what created another issue  The emails were all falling in my Hotmail s junk mail box  and some emails were never delivered  which I guess is related to the fact that they are not authenticated  That s why I decided to switch from mail   to PHPMailer with SMTP  after all

User · Answer

name     POST  name     email     POST  email     reciver       Reciver Email address      if  filter var  reciver  FILTER VALIDATE EMAIL          subject    name         To send HTML mail  the Content-type header must be set       headers    MIME-Version  1 0      r n        headers     Content-type  text html  charset iso-8859-1      r n        headers     From      email    r n      Sender s Email        headers     Cc      email    r n      Carbon copy to Sender      template     lt div style  padding 50px  color white   gt Hello   lt br  gt               lt br  gt  lt br  gt              Name     name   lt br  gt              Email     email   lt br  gt               lt br  gt               lt  div gt         sendmessage     lt div style   background-color  7E7E7E  color white    gt      template     lt  div gt           Message lines should not exceed 70 characters  PHP rule   so wrap it       sendmessage   wordwrap  sendmessage  70          Send mail by PHP Mail Function      mail  reciver   subject   sendmessage   headers       echo  Your Query has been received  We will contact you soon      else       echo   lt span gt   invalid email   lt  span gt

User · Answer

Try these two things separately and together    remove the if   POST  submit      remove  from  just my gut

User · Answer

Always try sending headers in the mail function  If you are sending mail through localhost then do the SMTP settings for sending mail  If you are sending mail through a server then check the email sending feature is enabled on your server

User · Answer

Maybe the problem is the configuration of the mail server  To avoid this type of problems or you do not have to worry about the mail server problem  I recommend you use PHPMailer   It is a plugin that has everything necessary to send mail  and the only thing you have to take into account is to have the SMTP port  Port  25 and 465   enabled   require once  PHPMailer PHPMailer php   require once   servicios PHPMailer SMTP php   require once   servicios PHPMailer Exception php     mail   new  PHPMailer PHPMailer PHPMailer true   try         Server settings      mail- gt SMTPDebug   0       mail- gt isSMTP         mail- gt Host    smtp gmail com        mail- gt SMTPAuth   true       mail- gt Username    correo gmail com        mail- gt Password    contrasenia        mail- gt SMTPSecure    ssl        mail- gt Port   465          Recipients      mail- gt setFrom  correo gmail com    my name         mail- gt addAddress  destination correo com            Attachments      mail- gt addAttachment  optional file               Add files  is optional         Content      mail- gt isHTML true     Set email format to HTML      mail- gt Subject   utf8 decode  subject         mail- gt Body      utf8 decode  mail content         mail- gt AltBody            mail- gt send      catch  Exception  e         error    mail- gt ErrorInfo

User · Answer

I think this should do the trick  I just added an if isset and added concatenation to the variables in the body to separate PHP from HTML    lt  php      name     POST  name         email     POST  email         message     POST  message         from    From  yoursite com         to    contact yoursite com         subject    Customer Inquiry        body    From     name   r n E-Mail     email   r n Message  r n    message   if  isset   POST  submit            if  mail   to   subject   body   from                   echo   lt p gt Your message has been sent  lt  p gt               else                 echo   lt p gt Something went wrong  go back and try again  lt  p gt                gt

User · Answer

You can see your errors by   error reporting E ALL     And my sample code is    lt  php     use PHPMailer PHPMailer PHPMailer      require  PHPMailer php       require  SMTP php       require  Exception php         name     POST  name         mailid     POST  mail         mail   new PHPMailer       mail- gt IsSMTP         mail- gt SMTPDebug   0                       Set mailer to use SMTP      mail- gt Host    smtp gmail com              Specify main and backup server      mail- gt Port   587                          Set the SMTP port      mail- gt SMTPAuth   true                     Enable SMTP authentication      mail- gt Username    someone gmail com       SMTP username      mail- gt Password    password                SMTP password      mail- gt SMTPSecure    tls                   Enable encryption   ssl  also accepted       mail- gt From    someone gmail com        mail- gt FromName    name        mail- gt AddAddress  mailid   name            Name is optional      mail- gt IsHTML true                          Set email format to HTML      mail- gt Subject    Here is the subject        mail- gt Body       Here is your message         mail- gt AltBody    This is the body in plain text for non-HTML mail clients       if    mail- gt Send             echo  Message could not be sent           echo  Mailer Error       mail- gt ErrorInfo         exit            echo  Message has been sent     gt

User · Answer

Add a mail header in the mail function    header    From  noreply example com r n    header    MIME-Version  1 0 r n    header    Content-Type  text html  charset ISO-8859-1 r n    header    X-Priority  1 r n     status   mail  to   subject   message   header    if  status        echo   lt p gt Your mail has been sent  lt  p gt      else       echo   lt p gt Something went wrong  Please try again  lt  p gt

User · Answer

Provided your sendmail system works  your code must be modified as follows    lt  php      name     POST  name         email     POST  email         message     POST  message          header    Content-Type  text html  charset UTF-8 r n MIME-Version  1 0 r n From     name    lt  email gt  r n Reply-To  no-reply yoursite com r n X-Mailer  yoursite com mailer r n          to     Contact   lt contact yoursite com gt          subject    Customer Inquiry        body   lt  lt  lt EOB  lt  DOCTYPE html gt   lt html gt       lt body gt           message      lt  body gt   lt  html gt  EOB       if    POST  submit              if  mail   to   subject   body   header      false                 echo   lt p gt Your message has been sent  lt  p gt              else                echo   lt p gt Something went wrong  go back and try again  lt  p gt                       gt    This enables you to send HTML-based emails   Of notable interest    we built a header multilines string  each line separated by r n   we added Content-type to express we return HTML so that you can compose better emails  you can add nay HTML code you want  including CSS  to your message as you would do in HTML page     Note   lt  lt  lt EOB syntax requires the last EOB marker begins as the beginning pf the line and has no space or whatever character after the semicolon

User · Answer

Mostly the mail   function is disabled in shared hosting  A better option is to use SMTP  The best option would be Gmail or SendGrid     SMTPconfig php   lt  php       SmtpServer  smtp            SmtpPort  2525     default      SmtpUser             SmtpPass          gt      SMTPmail php   lt  php class SMTPClient        function SMTPClient   SmtpServer   SmtpPort   SmtpUser   SmtpPass   from   to   subject   body                  this- gt SmtpServer    SmtpServer           this- gt SmtpUser   base64 encode   SmtpUser            this- gt SmtpPass   base64 encode   SmtpPass            this- gt from    from           this- gt to    to           this- gt subject    subject           this- gt body    body           if   SmtpPort                                this- gt PortSMTP   25                    else                        this- gt PortSMTP    SmtpPort                       function SendMail                   newLine     r n            headers    MIME-Version  1 0     newLine             headers     Content-type  text html  charset iso-8859-1     newLine             if   SMTPIN   fsockopen   this- gt SmtpServer   this- gt PortSMTP                          fputs   SMTPIN   EHLO    HTTP HOST   r n                  talk  hello     fgets    SMTPIN  1024                 fputs  SMTPIN   auth login r n                 talk  res   fgets  SMTPIN 1024               fputs  SMTPIN   this- gt SmtpUser   r n                 talk  user   fgets  SMTPIN 1024               fputs  SMTPIN   this- gt SmtpPass   r n                 talk  pass   fgets  SMTPIN 256               fputs   SMTPIN   MAIL FROM   lt    this- gt from   gt  r n                  talk  From     fgets    SMTPIN  1024                 fputs   SMTPIN   RCPT TO   lt    this- gt to   gt  r n                  talk  To     fgets   SMTPIN  1024                fputs  SMTPIN   DATA r n                 talk  data   fgets   SMTPIN 1024                fputs  SMTPIN   To   lt    this- gt to   gt  r nFrom   lt    this- gt from   gt  r n   headers   n nSubject    this- gt subject   r n r n r n   this- gt body   r n  r n                 talk  send   fgets  SMTPIN 256                 CLOSE CONNECTION AND EXIT                  fputs   SMTPIN   QUIT r n                 fclose  SMTPIN                                       return  talk             gt      contact email php   lt  php  include  SMTPconfig php    include  SMTPmail php    if   SERVER  REQUEST METHOD       POST          to            from     POST  email         subject    Enquiry        body     POST  name     lt  br gt     POST  companyName     lt  br gt     POST  tel     lt  br gt     lt hr   gt     POST  message         SMTPMail   new SMTPClient   SmtpServer   SmtpPort   SmtpUser   SmtpPass   from   to   subject   body        SMTPChat    SMTPMail- gt SendMail        gt

User · Answer

Make sure you have Sendmail installed in your server   If you have checked your code and verified that there is nothing wrong there  go to  var mail and check whether that folder is empty   If it is empty  you will need to do a   sudo apt-get install sendmail   if you are on an Ubuntu server

User · Answer

First of all  you might have too many parameters for the mail   function    You are able to have of maximum of five  mail to  subject  message  headers  parameters    As far as the  from variable goes  that should automatically come from your webhost if your using the Linux cPanel  It automatically comes from your cPanel username and IP address    name     POST  name     email     POST  email     message     POST  message     from    From  yoursite com    to    contact yoursite com    subject    Customer Inquiry    body    From   name n E-Mail   email n Message  n  message     Also make sure you have the correct order of variables in your mail   function   The mail  to   subject   message  etc   in that order  or else there is a chance of it not working

User · Answer

Although there are portions of this answer that apply to only to the usage of themail   function itself  many of these troubleshooting steps can be applied to any PHP mailing system  There are a variety of reasons your script appears to not be sending emails  It s difficult to diagnose these things unless there is an obvious syntax error  Without one you need to run through the checklist below to find any potential pitfalls you may be encountering  Make sure error reporting is enabled and set to report all errors Error reporting is essential to rooting out bugs in your code and general errors that PHP encounters  Error reporting needs to be enabled to receive these errors  Placing the following code at the top of your PHP files  or in a master configuration file  will enable error reporting  error reporting -1   ini set  display errors    On    set error handler  quot var dump quot     See How can I get useful error messages in PHP      this answer for more details on this  Make sure the mail   function is called It may seem silly but a common error is to forget to actually place the mail   function in your code  Make sure it is there and not commented out  Make sure the mail   function is called correctly  bool mail   string  to   string  subject   string  message    string  additional headers    string  additional parameters       The mail function takes three required parameters and optionally a fourth and fifth one  If your call to mail   does not have at least three parameters it will fail  If your call to mail   does not have the correct parameters in the correct order it will also fail  Check the server s mail logs Your web server should be logging all attempts to send emails through it  The location of these logs will vary  you may need to ask your server administrator where they are located  but they can commonly be found in a user s root directory under logs  Inside will be error messages the server reported  if any  related to your attempts to send emails  Check for Port connection failure Port block is a very common problem which most developers face while integrating their code to deliver emails using SMTP  And  this can be easily traced at the server maillogs  the location of server of mail log can vary from server to server  as explained above   In case you are on a shared hosting server  the ports 25 and 587 remain blocked by default  This block is been purposely done by your hosting provider  This is true even for some of the dedicated servers  When these ports are blocked  try to connect using port 2525  If you find that port is also blocked  then the only solution is to contact your hosting provider to unblock these ports  Most of the hosting providers block these email ports to protect their network from sending any spam emails  Use ports 25 or 587 for plain TLS connections and port 465 for SSL connections  For most users  it is suggested to use port 587 to avoid rate limits set by some hosting providers  Don t use the error suppression operator When the error suppression operator   is prepended to an expression in PHP  any error messages that might be generated by that expression will be ignored  There are circumstances where using this operator is necessary but sending mail is not one of them  If your code contains  mail      then you may be hiding important error messages that will help you debug this  Remove the   and see if any errors are reported  It s only advisable when you check with error get last   right afterwards for concrete failures  Check the mail   return value The mail   function   Returns TRUE if the mail was successfully accepted for delivery  FALSE otherwise  It is important to note that just because the mail was accepted for delivery  it does NOT mean the mail will actually reach the intended destination   This is important to note because   If you receive a FALSE return value you know the error lies with your server accepting your mail  This probably isn t a coding issue but a server configuration issue  You need to speak to your system administrator to find out why this is happening  If you receive a TRUE return value it does not mean your email will definitely be sent  It just means the email was sent to its respective handler on the server successfully by PHP  There are still more points of failure outside of PHP s control that can cause the email to not be sent   So FALSE will help point you in the right direction whereas TRUE does not necessarily mean your email was sent successfully  This is important to note  Make sure your hosting provider allows you to send emails and does not limit mail sending Many shared webhosts  especially free webhosting providers  either do not allow emails to be sent from their servers or limit the amount that can be sent during any given time period  This is due to their efforts to limit spammers from taking advantage of their cheaper services  If you think your host has emailing limits or blocks the sending of emails  check their FAQs to see if they list any such limitations  Otherwise  you may need to reach out to their support to verify if there are any restrictions in place around the sending of emails  Check spam folders  prevent emails from being flagged as spam Oftentimes  for various reasons  emails sent through PHP  and other server-side programming languages  end up in a recipient s spam folder  Always check there before troubleshooting your code  To avoid mail sent through PHP from being sent to a recipient s spam folder  there are various things you can do  both in your PHP code and otherwise  to minimize the chances your emails are marked as spam  Good tips from Michiel de Mare include    Use email authentication methods  such as SPF  and DKIM to prove that your emails and your domain name belong together  and to prevent spoofing of your domain name  The SPF website includes a wizard to generate the DNS information for your site  Check your reverse DNS to make sure the IP address of your mail server points to the domain name that you use for sending mail  Make sure that the IP-address that you re using is not on a blacklist Make sure that the reply-to address is a valid  existing address  Use the full  real name of the addressee in the To field  not just the email-address  e g   quot John Smith quot   lt john blacksmiths-international com gt     Monitor your abuse accounts  such as abuse yourdomain com and postmaster yourdomain com  That means - make sure that these accounts exist  read what s sent to them  and act on complaints  Finally  make it really easy to unsubscribe  Otherwise  your users will unsubscribe by pressing the spam button  and that will affect your reputation    See How do you make sure email you send programmatically is not automatically marked as spam  for more on this topic  Make sure all mail headers are supplied Some spam software will reject mail if it is missing common headers such as  quot From quot  and  quot Reply-to quot    headers   array  quot From  from example com quot        quot Reply-To  replyto example com quot        quot X-Mailer  PHP  quot    PHP VERSION     headers   implode  quot  r n quot    headers   mail  to   subject   message   headers    Make sure mail headers have no syntax errors Invalid headers are just as bad as having no headers  One incorrect character could be all it takes to derail your email  Double-check to make sure your syntax is correct as PHP will not catch these errors for you   headers   array  quot From from example com quot      missing colon      quot Reply To  replyto example com quot           missing hyphen      quot X-Mailer   quot PHP quot   quot    PHP VERSION         bad quotes     Don t use a faux From  sender While the mail must have a From  sender  you may not just use any value  In particular user-supplied sender addresses are a surefire way to get mails blocked   headers   array  quot From    POST contactform sender email  quot       No   Reason  your web or sending mail server is not SPF DKIM-whitelisted to pretend being responsible for  hotmail or  gmail addresses  It may even silently drop mails with From  sender domains it s not configured for  Make sure the recipient value is correct Sometimes the problem is as simple as having an incorrect value for the recipient of the email  This can be due to using an incorrect variable   to    user example com      other variables      mail  recipient   subject   message   headers       recipient should be  to  Another way to test this is to hard code the recipient value into the mail   function call  mail  user example com    subject   message   headers     This can apply to all of the mail   parameters  Send to multiple accounts To help rule out email account issues  send your email to multiple email accounts at different email providers  If your emails are not arriving at a user s Gmail account  send the same emails to a Yahoo account  a Hotmail account  and a regular POP3 account  like your ISP-provided email account   If the emails arrive at all or some of the other email accounts  you know your code is sending emails but it is likely that the email account provider is blocking them for some reason  If the email does not arrive at any email account  the problem is more likely to be related to your code  Make sure the code matches the form method If you have set your form method to POST  make sure you are using   POST to look for your form values  If you have set it to GET or didn t set it at all  make sure you use   GET to look for your form values  Make sure your form action value points to the correct location Make sure your form action attribute contains a value that points to your PHP mailing code   lt form action  quot send email php quot  method  quot POST quot  gt   Make sure the Web host supports sending email Some Web hosting providers do not allow or enable the sending of emails through their servers  The reasons for this may vary but if they have disabled the sending of mail you will need to use an alternative method that uses a third party to send those emails for you  An email to their technical support  after a trip to their online support or FAQ  should clarify if email capabilities are available on your server  Make sure the localhost mail server is configured If you are developing on your local workstation using WAMP  MAMP  or XAMPP  an email server is probably not installed on your workstation  Without one  PHP cannot send mail by default  You can overcome this by installing a basic mail server  For Windows you can use the free Mercury Mail  You can also use SMTP to send your emails  See this great answer from Vikas Dwivedi to learn how to do this  Enable PHP s custom mail log In addition to your MTA s and PHP s log file  you can enable logging for the mail   function specifically  It doesn t record the complete SMTP interaction  but at least function call parameters and invocation script  ini set  quot mail log quot    quot  tmp mail log quot    ini set  quot mail add x header quot   TRUE    See http   php net manual en mail configuration php for details   It s best to enable these options in the php ini or  user ini or  htaccess perhaps   Check with a mail testing service There are various delivery and spamminess checking services you can utilize to test your MTA webserver setup  Typically you send a mail probe To  their address  then get a delivery report and more concrete failures or analyzations later   mail-tester com  free simple  glockapps com  free      senforensics com  signup      mailtrap io  pro      ultratools     emailTest  free MX checks only  Various  http   www verticalresponse com blog 7-email-testing-delivery-tools   Use a different mailer PHP s built-in mail   function is handy and often gets the job done but it has its shortcomings  Fortunately  there are alternatives that offer more power and flexibility including handling a lot of the issues outlined above   Most popular being  PHPMailer Likewise featureful  SwiftMailer Or even the older PEAR  Mail   All of which can be combined with a professional SMTP server service provider   Because typical 08 15 shared webhosting plans are hit or miss when it comes to email setup configurability

User · Answer

For anyone who finds this going forward  I would not recommend using mail  There s some answers that touch on this  but not the why of it  PHP s mail function is not only opaque  it fully relies on whatever MTA you use  i e  Sendmail  to do the work  mail will only tell you if the MTA failed to accept it  i e  Sendmail was down when you tried to send   It cannot tell you if the mail was successful because it s handed it off  As such  as John Conde s answer details   you now get to fiddle with the logs of the MTA and hope that it tells you enough about the failure to fix it  If you re on a shared host or don t have access to the MTA logs  you re out of luck  Sadly  the default for most vanilla installs for Linux handle it this way  A mail library  PHPMailer  Zend Framework 2   etc    does something very different from mail  They open a socket directly to the receiving mail server and then send the SMTP mail commands directly over that socket  In other words  the class acts as its own MTA  note that you can tell the libraries to use mail to ultimately send the mail  but I would strongly recommend you not do that   This means you can then directly see the responses from the receiving server  in PHPMailer  for instance  you can turn on debugging output   No more guessing if a mail failed to send or why   If you re using SMTP  i e  you re calling isSMTP     you can get a detailed transcript of the SMTP conversation using the SMTPDebug property  Set this option by including a line like this in your script   mail- gt SMTPDebug   2    You also get the benefit of a better interface  With mail you have to set up all your headers  attachments  etc  With a library  you have a dedicated function to do that  It also means the function is doing all the tricky parts  like headers

User · Answer

It worked for me on 000webhost by doing the following    headers     MIME-Version  1 0      r n    headers     Content-type  text html  charset iso-8859-1      r n    headers     From      from    r n    headers     Reply-To      from    r n    headers     X-Mailer  PHP     phpversion     headers     X-Priority  1      r n     Enter directly the email address when sending the email   mail  email gmail com    subject   message   headers    Use    and not      This code works  but the email was received with half an hour lag

[php] PHP mail function doesn't complete sending of e-mail

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