PHP mail: "sender" should display real sender, not webserver

[Herg]

Hello guys,

I have a small problem with a php mailer. I am sure you could help me and thank you in advance:

Situtation:

I am about to establish a newsletter. I manage the newsletter with sendblaster (www.sendblaster.com). To unsubscribe from the newsletter, people would have to send an e-mail with the subject "unsubscribe". The program reads that e-mail and removes them from the list of recipients.

I want the users also to be able to unsibscribe via a webform. Therefore I modified the free registration php mailer to fullfill the needs of unsubscribing. All works fine, exept one thing:

When I receive the e-mail, the displayed "sender" is always the webserver. But I want the sender to be the e-mail adress people have netered into the form. In the code listed below, that should be the varible $email

<?php
$emailmanager = 'NOTTODEDISCLOSED'; 

$urlok = 'unsubscribe-confirm-ok.htm';
$urlko = 'unsubscribe-confirm-ko.htm';

error_reporting(0);
set_magic_quotes_runtime (0);
if (get_magic_quotes_gpc()) {
		foreach($_POST as $k=>$v)
				$_POST[$k] = stripslashes($v);
		foreach($_COOKIE as $k=>$v)
				$_COOKIE[$k] = stripslashes($v);
}

$msg = $_COOKIE['sb'.$_GET['id']];

$email = trim($_GET['email']);
$Ok = ereg("^([a-zA-Z0-9_\.-]+)@((\[[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.)|(([a-zA-Z0-9\-]+\.)+))([a-zA-Z]{2,4}|[0-9]{1,3})(\]?)$", $email);

$headers  = 'From: ' . $email . "\n";
$headers .= 'MIME-Version: 1.0' ."\n";
$headers .= 'Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1' ."\n";
$headers .= 'Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit'. "\n\n";

if ($Ok && ($msg != '')) {
		mail($email,'Unsubscribe',$headers);
		Header("Location: $urlok");
} else {
		Header("Location: $urlko");
}
?>

In my opinion, the sender should be derived from the variable $email. But it does not work. However, when I enter $emailmanager instead, this variable will be shown as the sender. I really don't know why this is...

Thank you so much for your help in advance!

Herg

Edited October 23, 2009 by Herg

[Herg]

Hey guys. I solved the problem. I was just too silly to read the php syntax properly.

The function mail must be fed with variables (in this order): to, subject, message, headers.

Since only need an empty mail with correct headers, I had removed the 'message' string in the first place.

So below you will find the correct code for the relevant part for sending a the mail as I wanted it to be.

...
$headers .= 'From: '.$email."\n";
$headers .= 'MIME-Version: 1.0' ."\n";
$headers .= 'Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1' ."\n";
$headers .= 'Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit'. "\n\n";

if ($Ok && ($msg != '')) {
		mail($emailmanager, 'Unsubscribe', 'Abmeldung', $headers);
		Header("Location: $urlok");
} else {
		Header("Location: $urlko");
}
?>

Edited October 28, 2009 by Herg