mail function headache

[Anon]

I am trying to use the mail() function to send an email from a user submitted form. My form has 2 inputs, a standard 1 line text field that I use as $mailto and a textarea form control that I use as $message. The script resolves to print my success message, but no email gets sent. I suspect it\'s because of the input from the textarea form control. Do I need to format this in some special way? Here is my script:

$mailto = $var_email;
$delim = \"\t\";
$keep_blanks = TRUE;

$subject = \"subject goes here\";

if (!$action) {
$action = \'mail\';
}

if ($action == \'mail\' && !$from) {
$from = ($contact_email);
}

if ($action == \'mail\' && !$message) {
$comments = $message;
}

if ($action == \'mail\' && !$mailto) {
die ( \"No mailto is specified! If you want the form to email the results, then
you must specify a mailto variable so that they get sent somewhere.\");
}

if ($action == \'mail\') {

mail(\"$mailto\",   \"$subject\",   \"$comments\",  \"From: $from\"); 

print(\"<font face=\'arial, helvetica, sans-serif\'>\");
print(\"Your message has been sent\");
print(\"</font>\"); 
}

[Anon]

Well, have you got your mailserver set up correctly in your php config file?

(also, you don't have to encapsulate those values in quotes:
mail($mailto, $subject, $comments, "From: $from");
works just as well)

can you send a simple mail using a test script?

[Anon]

yes, actually I was getting $from from string passed thru the url, which I had wrapped in base64_encode(); and base64_decode(); functions... when I removed the encoding function the email got sent... so I need to figure out why my variable wasn't getting decoded properly.