Saturday, June 20, 2009

How to create an online form that send to my email address?

I need help on how to create an online form. I have used dreamweaver but everytime i try it out, when i hit the submit button it opens an email application. Instead of submitting it to the specified email address
How to create an online form that send to my email address?
In talking about sending email, it is important to understand that there are two parts to email: the server which actually sends/receives/stores email, and the client which tells the server what to do (for example, Outlook or Yahoo webmail).





The reason an email application is opening when you click the submit button is because the browser you are using to view the page does not know how to communicate with an email server to tell it to send your message, so it tries to run a program that can do it.





If you want visitors to your website to send email without running a program on their computers, you need to have your page connect to an email server behind the scenes and tell it to send messages on behalf of the visitors. For this you need a server-side scripting language, such as ASP, PHP, Perl, etc.





I don't want to discourage you, unfortunately, beyond the background I've provided, there isn't really a simple solution--you need to have some programming skills in order to get this working. If you feel you can handle it, here are some tutorials on how to send webmail the way you want:





With ASP: http://www.sitepoint.com/article/sending...


With PHP: http://email.about.com/cs/phpemailtips/q...





If you'd like, you can IM me and I'll discuss this with your further.
Reply:One commmon (though old) application for doing this is FormMail. It's a perl program which you install on your server. There are some pretty complete instructions with it, but still it might be a problem installing if you're not a programmer.





You can download it for free from http://www.scriptarchive.com/formmail.ht...





Like I said, it's old (the latest update is 2002) and it does have some security problems, but it's a quick way of getting up and running.





It works on a unix/linux server. (If your web server is a Windows server, this won't work.)
Reply:It all depends which programming language your website supports. I am assuming it supports .NET. The below article has an explanation and full source code of sending a feedback form in .NET

No comments:

Post a Comment