Your Email forms Won’t Work?
Is it because they’re not supported?
Read on!
Some of the most common questions our mentor community is asked relate to Email
Forms, aka Mailto Forms. These are HTML pages that include a form in which the site visitor can
enter some information and send it via email to the intended recipient. There
are several common uses for this type of form. They are often used as a feedback
mechanism, whereby a visitor can send comments or suggestions about the site
back to the webmaster. They are also used as a mechanism to capture data and
send it off to a recipient at a remote location, bypassing the need for a
database in or near the system where the site is being hosted. Webmasters come
up with plenty of creative ways of using these forms, but increasingly over
recent months, are also coming up against some problems.
The distinguishing characteristic of an email form is found in its "ACTION"
statement in the <FORM> tag. There is a description of this type of form in the HTML Goodies Forms Tutorials
In the example on that page we see this "ACTION" statement:
<FORM METHOD="POST" ACTION="mailto:your email address">
The "ACTION" in this example is a "mailto:" with an email address. It is this
which defines this form as an email form.
The problem arises because modern browsers, IE6 + and equivalent, no longer
support email forms! The effect of this is that the visitor fills out the form
and clicks the submit button and their email client program is invoked showing a
blank email with the specified address in the "To" field. All information
entered on the form appears to have been ignored. Essentially, these browsers
are treating the email form as if it was a simple "Mailto" email link (for
information about email links, see
the HTML Mailto: Primer
That’s the problem, but like all good programmers all we see is an opportunity
for a creative solution!
With that in mind, here are three solution offerings. The first is a solution
primarily aimed at Unix (or similar) operating systems, and involves the use of
CGI (Common Gateway Interface – see
CGI Tutorials) and a mail system such as
SENDMAIL (commonly installed on Unix and Linux systems.) The second is a little
more specialized, in that it requires FrontPage Extensions, and the last, which
uses ASP will only work for those of you who host your sites on Microsoft
servers.
The first involves the use of a script to send the email form. One such script
is the very popular formmail.pl originally available from Matt’s Script Archive at
http://www.scriptarchive.com/formmail.html although the most
recent version, and most secure version, is now obtainable from the NMS project
at
http://nms-cgi.sourceforge.net/
This script is
accessed via the "ACTION" as in this example:
<FORM ACTION="/cgi-bin/formmail.pl" METHOD="POST">
There is a lot of comprehensive help information on Matt’s site that describes
very well how to use this script, so there is not much point in going into
details here. There are a couple of things to point out, however. First, in
order to use this script, the host system must support CGI and make it available
to you. Check with your hosting company if you’re not sure. Secondly, you would
be well advised to heed the security advice that Matt offers. Formmail, being a
popular script, is the target of a lot of exploitation. Some good sense
precautions can go a long way to minimize the exposure. It is worth noting that
most of the exploits become a problem for your hosting company more than for the
website itself.
The second solution is available where FrontPage Extensions are available on the
hosting server. The extensions will also need to have been configured to handle
email. Again, check with your hosting company if you’re not sure. Included in
the FrontPage Extensions is a series of capabilities provided by what Microsoft
calls "Webbots". If you use a FrontPage Extension aware editor to create your
form, the program will provide you the ability to specify an email address to
send the form data to as a property of the form. The program then generates the
instructions needed to utilize the Webbot to send out your email. This is a very
simple method, but does depend on the availability of the extensions and a
suitable editing program (such as FrontPage itself.)
Next, I present a solution using one more technology, namely ASP. I have
included a complete sample page with all code in place for you to try out. This solution, being an
ASP solution, will only work for those of you who have your sites hosted on a
Microsoft platform.
