PHP email form, how to bypass host limitation? (Can ONLY send/receive IF hosting sender/receiver)

Question

My webhost ONLY allows sending/recieving emails IF either the sender or reciever is hosted with them. (freehostia.com)

This is a huge disadvantage to me (and I'm assuming everyone else), because of the way my website works.

(My website: I have a classifieds website where CustomerA posts an ad with her email and CustomerB replies via the email form with his email. Neither email is hosted with my host.)

I asked if I could use an external SMTP server (such as Gmail) to bypass the limitations, and they said "Even if you set an external MX record for your domain you will not be able to send e-mails via your mail forum, if you do not use a mailbox from your hosting account with us as a sender or recipient."

Theoretical Workaround:

1. Auto-enter and hide my hosted email into the "email" section of the form
2. Have a new section for customer to input their email
3. When a message is sent, embed customers message and email into a default message. It will look like this:

---

To: customerA@example.com

From: DONOTREPLY@example.com

Subject: You have recieved a message!

Body: Blahblahblah (customers message) blahblah. To reply, email: customerB@example.com

---

Sorry about all the confusion. Would this work? Should I give up? I really like my host, but should I switch? Or is there a better workaround?

Answer 1

While you don't need to send through a different server, you can just send to whom you need and set the reply to any address you want.

The mail function allows you to set your own headers as a final parameter.

$headers = 'Reply-To: someone@some_other_domain.com\n\r';
mail($to, $subject, $body, $headers);

Answer 2

You can set the reply-to address.

That way even though the email is sent from your address, when the recipient hits reply it creates an email to the address given in the reply-to.

I'm not sure what you are using to send mail but there are some examples in the PHP documentation mail function - http://php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php