Copy and paste this code into a file called "signup.html" and upload it to your web server. You'll see a text box waiting for your visitor to enter his or her e-mail address so they can be sent that autoresponse message.

Of course, form won't work just yet because, if you look at first line of that HTML code I gave you, you'll see that form submits to a script called "some-script.php". And we haven't made that just yet.

Look on second line of "signup.html", at last half of line. You should be familiar with HTML tags, but if you're not, an HTML tag consists of two parts: parent tag and attributes.

The parent tag is simply tag's designation. For example, if you had a slice of HTML code that looked like this:

Then parent tag would be "font". The rest of what's enclosed in tag tells browser what to do with it. For example, in this tag attributes are that font should be Verdana with size 1.

Why am I telling you all this? Because it relates to HTML code you see in signup.html.

Now, when you look at this:

The code tells receiving browser that this is an "input" tag, meaning that it's a form field. The name of this item is "email" and its size is 30, meaning this text box should be 30 characters in width.

When form is submitted, it takes all values of all fields inside that form and throws it at its destination. In this case, our destination is "some-script.php".

If you're lost, this will all make a whole lot more sense once you try this next step.

Make a file called "some-script.php" and paste this line of code into it:

Upload script in same folder as signup.html, and go to "signup.html". Type your e-mail address in and click submit button.

You should see a new page containing just your e-mail address and nothing else.

Is this starting to make sense? You told PHP script to dump contents of variable called "email" to screen, and you just submitted a form with a text box called "email".

If you want to try one more exercise like this, change name of text box to, say, "goober" in signup.html and change $email in some-script.php to $goober. Upload both, go to signup.html, and type anything into text box. You'll get same result.

This is how you'll pass data from forms (like text fields, drop down menus, radio buttons and like) along into PHP scripts you create.

We've just covered how to submit form elements into PHP. Now let's focus on sending mail.

PHP has a really simple function that uses whatever mail sending program is installed on your server to send messages to outside world. If you have a crappy web server, this step might not work and you'll have to use a different web host if you want to try this.

But if you're on a good web host that has PHP installed *correctly*, this shouldn't be a problem.

Up until now we haven't used functions in PHP too much, aside from simple things like include() and header(). Today's your lucky day, because functions work in a very similar way to HTML tags. You have parent tag, and attributes (or parameters).

The mail() function basically works like this:

mail("recipient","subject","body","headers");

Let's start off by sending a simple e-mail message to yourself. We won't need any special headers this time around, so this will be quick and painless. Copy this one line of code into "mailtest.php":