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body of my message."); ?>

Replace "billg@microsoft.com" with your actual e-mail address, but be *sure* to keep quotes around it. Save it, and upload mailtest.php to your web server and run it in browser. You should see a blank page. Wait a few minutes and check your mail. You should see a mysterious mail message in your box with subject "Hello" and message "Hi. This is body of my message."

If you're using a free e-mail service or a weird ISP, message won't come through because a lot of mail servers these days require that certain headers are present in message.

Let's do that now.

What's below isn't important enough to explain thoroughly, but it's just header information that is interpreted by mail server. This data tells us that we're sending a plain text e-mail, that message came from your e-mail address (and gives your name), and tells us that e-mail "client" we used was PHP.

$headers = "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii From: $myname <$mymail> Reply-To: <$mymail> Return-Path: <$mymail> X-Mailer: PHP";

This is code you should have by this point, complete with header information and variables which tell script what your name and e-mail address are:

$email = "billg@microsoft.com";

$myname = "Your Name Here"; $mymail = "your@email.here";

$headers = "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii From: $myname <$mymail> Reply-To: <$mymail> Return-Path: <$mymail> X-Mailer: PHP";

mail($email,"Hello","Hi. This is body of my message.",$headers);

?>

Notice how we've simplified things a bit by using variables in mail() function. That way we don't have to retype things. This method also looks better (in my opinion anyway) and is easier to tweak once you're ready to actually customize it for yourself.

Try this out again. Believe it or not, but you just made your first autoresponder! Before we move on let's make this look even cleaner:

$myname = "Your Name Here"; $mymail = "your@email.here";

$subject = "Hello"; $body = "Hi. This is body of my message. Notice how I can continue typing right on next line!";

$headers = "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii From: $myname <$mymail> Reply-To: <$mymail> Return-Path: <$mymail> X-Mailer: PHP";

if ($email != "") { mail($email,$subject,$body,$headers); }

?>

All I did here was just make things look nicer, but notice how I removed line that set $email to "billg@microsoft.com." This is because value of $email will be passed to script from that form we made earlier.

This also sends e-mail message ONLY if value of $email is not blank. So if someone just hit submit button without entering an address, script won't try to send e-mail message.

Everything should be ready for you to try out now. Re-upload "some-script.php" and go to signup.html. Enter your e-mail address in field, hit submit and wait for that mail message to arrive.

There's only one step left to making this autoresponder complete. And that's sending user somewhere so they aren't given a blank page.

Find this line in your script: if ($email != "") { mail($email,$subject,$body,$headers); }

And paste this directly underneath it: header("Location:http://www.jumpx.com"); die();

Try autoresponder out. You'll see that once autoresponse message is sent, you're directed to www.jumpx.com. Now, go ahead and change it to whatever URL you want to use. Or, make use it with a variable so end result is like this:

$myredirect = "http://www.my-domain-name.com hankyou.html";

$myname = "Your Name Here"; $mymail = "your@email.here";

$subject = "Hello"; $body = "Hi. This is body of my message. Notice how I can continue typing right on next line!";

$headers = "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii From: $myname <$mymail> Reply-To: <$mymail> Return-Path: <$mymail> X-Mailer: PHP";

if ($email != "") { mail($email,$subject,$body,$headers); } header("Location:$myredirect"); die();

?>

Don't forget to change values above. "http://www.my-domain-name.com hankyou.html" needs to point to URL where thankyou.html is stored.

You're done. Don't forget to send John feedback for me. If you're really curious as to how to do something in PHP, I might just write an article on it.

Article by Robert Plank PHP Newsletter: http://www.jumpx.com/newsletter