That's how it was in our latest struggle through the Great App that will Solve all Problems (GASP). One of the last things we chose to implement in the GASP is a mailto function that will mail an internal user when an external user does something. Sounds easy, yes? And in fact, it is. But it took us a while to get there. Because we learn everything the hard way.

So to keep anyone else from going through the crap we went through: make sure the server you are working on will send out mail before you go nuts trying to make it work. That might seem obvious to others. But remember: we learn things the hard way. Having an external, private server can help immensely on this. Before you fuss about scripts that don't work, test them on a server you know is good.

So what did we use, what did we learn? Mailing something in php is a snap. Just use the mail() function. Do not listen to all the other crap out there about needing x number of files to get shit done. Use the friggin mail() function. It goes mail($to, $subject, $message).

That said, the Surreal-Atmosphere tutorial was very helpful. So thank you for taking apart a small script and kicking it around until it made sense.

Many people apparantly found the emailform.php script very useful. That may be. We did not. We also did not find Jack's FormMail.php useful. But both of these failures were, most likely, due to the server we were developing on.

Lastly, if you need more features in mailing, you might want to check out PHPMailer on sourceforge. They seem like there's a lot there to work with. And they have docs, which makes our cold blackened hearts happy.