PHP Mail function

Hello

I want to send a mail in local host using through PHP but I can`t send it ..Please suggest me how to send a mail using PHP.
Warning: mail() [function.mail]: SMTP server
response: 550 The address is not valid. in
C:xampphtdocstest1send_contact.php on line 11
ERROR

here I`m sending you php code ..

Mail.html
<form name="form1" method="post" action="send_contact.php">

subject:<input name="subject" type="text" id="subject" size="50"><br/>
</br>
Detail:<textarea name="detail" cols="50" rows="4" id="detail"></textarea><br/>

</br>
Name:<input name="name" type="text" id="name" size="50"><br/>
Mail:<input name="customer_mail" type="text" id="customer_mail" size="50"><br/>

</br>
<input type="submit" name="Submit" value="Submit">
<input type="reset" name="Submit2" value="Reset">

</form>
send_contact.php:
<?php
// subject
$subject ="$subject";
// Details
$message="$detail";
// sender
$mail_from="$customer_mail";
// From
$header="from: $name <$mail_from>";
$to =`karthick_cse06@...`;
$send_contact=mail($to,$subject,$message,$header);
if($send_contact){
echo "We`ve recived your contact information";
}
else {
echo "ERROR";
}
?>

Sending PHP email from Windows servers is often problematic. Unike Unix and Linux systems, most Windows systems don`t have an SMTP server for PHP to use.  It is often necessary to edit the php.ini file and set an external SMTP server.  After any change to php.ini, restart the webserver program for the changes to take effect.

Perhaps you have that part set up correctly. To find out, you should make the most basic test possible, someting on the order of:

mail("karthick_cse06@...", "test message", "this is a test");

See if this line (in PHP tags) when run through the webserver will transmit an email to your account. Watch the spam folder.

Two other areas which could cause problems in your implementation are the From: address. From: addresses often don`t work as well on Windows as they do from Unix systems. Hence, your ability to set them at all may be limited. The usage of "real name" <email@...> for the address may also fail in some cases.

One thing to keep in mind is that the From: address is set up in an email header value in the fourth argument of the mail() function. You can pass almost anything in that variable but whether it will be interpreted by the SMTP server is the potential issue. For standards-compliant servers you have to follow the expected spelling, capitalization, format and line ending for the header. In this case, it should be:

$header = "From: email@...rn";

Note that "From" is capitalized and there is one space after the colon. The rn is a representation of the carriage return (ASCII 13) and newline (ASCII 10) characters which are part of the standard for line endings on email. They will work in double quotes but not single quotes.

Your example script should not be used on the web since it is fairly easily hacked and could be used to send spam email from your domain/IP and quickly get your machine on a blacklist. For one thing you are doing no input validation of the form variables being passed to the mail() function.