Email Notification for Registration

PHP
1

Hi,

I have a written a registration script which enters the information into the db and sets MD5 and reports errors like duplicate emails.

However I am completely stuck on how to integrate an email notification into it.

Does anyone know how to do this or point me in the right direction.

2

Hello,

php offers a simple way to email. using mail(). Here’s an example of my email registration code.



$headers = "From: no-reply@yourdomain.com" . "\\r\
" . "Reply-to: somthing@yourdomain.com";

$message = "Hello {$name}, welcome to <sitename> you  you can login with: {$email} and your the password you entered";

$subject = "Your Account";

$to = $_POST['email']; // you should run that through a cleaning function or clean it some how

mail($to,$subject,$message,$headers);

You should always set headers when you send an email. This is just good practice (or at least i think they should be set). I added a reply-to because i send from a account that is not monitered. And if the person that recives the email replys it well be sent to the one i check. However this is not needed. and then subject (you don’t want an email to go out with out a subject do you?). Any ways this is a basic run down i am sure people have different ways of applying this.

1 Like
3

Thanks, I have got this working. How do I turn into a system where by the user has to click a link into the email to confirm receipt?

4

You would need to generate an key. I have used mt_rand() and then hashed it using sha384. So here’s an example.


 <?php
    $activateKey = hash('sha384', mt_rand());
  ?>

you would just insert the key into a database and then just replace the other message with this one:



$message = "Hello {$name},
 Before you can use your account you must activate it! you can activate here: http://mysite.com/activate.php?key={$activateKey}&email={$email}";

Then on the activate page you would query your database for example you do do



$query = 'SELECT from activate_keys WHERE `email` = {$email} AND `key` = {$key}';

Also as a side note {} are short tags. You could also use (and should) use ‘.$var.’ on a system that well end up on different servers etc(ie. if you plan to distribute)

5

There is no reason for the email address to be sent in the activation link as a random hash key would be enough to validate the user since it can only be seen by the person who signed up, as for validating the email address the filter_input() function can handle that.

$to = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'email', FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL);