Yes it is, but .... it ONLY looks for redirect and recipient and ignores the rest. Something tells me wht he meant to do was this line: $val = trim($val); is a typo and he meant: ${$key} = trim($val); which essentially bypasses the register globals off setting. Not recommended. So what you end up with is a bunch of empty PHP vars, all with a strlen of 0 - hence the error triggering. Best, as Dmitriy points out is to just refer to the var in its POST format and be done with it. PHP 4 is almost dead. PHP 6 will not allow overriding this like your old host did, and when that happens, there will be a lot of companies scrambling.