First set up your testing server and local server to point to the same folder, and set your URL prefix.

Create your .php file in that folder and name it anything you want.

Go ahead and format it any way you want using CSS. Be sure to give it Your Name: Your Message: and text fields for each.

Make sure it has a submit button. (You can also include a drop down menu for HTML or Plain Text if you like.

Start by typing your mail command with a to, subject, and message rapped in the <?php ?> tag:

Then give values to your three variables such as:

As set up now, once you preview in the browser, it will send the mail. Each time you preview the page, it will also send an email. However, there is nothing on the page to let you know it is working. Lets add something to our page to show us if the email is functioning properly.

Wrap the mail function in a conditional and echo back text so you know if it has or has not been processed.

Now we want to customize the look of the email that is sent. Grab the headers code (from 02MailHeaders.php file). Paste them into your .php doc above the mail section next to your previous variables.

This is the shorthand advanced way of doing concatenation. The \r\n is code for return new line. This makes things move down the page.

You can change the X sender to your own personal email address. Example:

You can also change the From portion to be more personal such as:

Now add the $headers variable to your mail function:

You can change your final message by putting it on more than one line by using concatenation.

The formatting above will only work if you've set the content type to text/html. (If you want plain text you can just uncomment it out and comment out the html line).

Now that the email is set up and working, we need to change the script so it only works when we use our form.

With the property inspector up, set the Your Name: text field to "username".

Set the Your Message: text field to "usermessage".

In our example, set the dropdown bar to "contentType".

Set the submit button name to "submit", and the value to "Send Us A Message".

Select the form tag from the breadcrumbs, then in the Actions area, point it back to the same document you are working in.

Make sure the Method is set to POST.

Now we need to run a conditional to see if the form has been sent. Above all your variables add:

Now select all your php under that and tab to move it in a bit.

Then add one more } at the bottom to close out the if statement.

At this point it will work whether or not you fill anything in. Now we just need to plug in the variables.

Under the if bracket above, we are going to create all three variables used in the form:

Now we can use concatenation to set the username in the From section of our email.

We can also set up the usermessage such as:

We can also wrap the dropdown in a condition so we know whether its html or plain text they prefer. Above the content type, type the following in:

We can customize the message further by adding the following:

Finally, we can take the $finalMessage and put it in the conditional under the $headers section. (See the 01phpEmail.php document for the final example.

This is the very basic way to set up the emails. The 03 folder has more complete information and you can always use php.net to find out more.