webpage mailing forms
What are Mailing forms?
These are forms on your webpages that allow people to submit data which can then
be emailed to you. These styles of forms are commonly used to take orders on your
site, or allow people to fill them out so you can find out who is looking at your
pages. You could also have a form for comments or to collect suggestions and/or
provide another way for people visiting your page to contact you.
To create the form you first need to create the webpage that will consist of the spaces and buttons your viewers will use to submit their data. After that you will need to add the mechanics that will receive the viewer input and process it in some way (such as email you!).
Mailing web forms to yourself
To use iiNet's mail script with your form, you need to set the form's ACTION to
point to "http://www.iinet.net.au/bin/mail" . The form HTML should look
something like this:
<form method=post action="http://www.iinet.net.au/bin/mail">This is all you need to do if you are a standard iiNet account holder (if your website URL is something like http://www.iinet.net.au/~username/).
If you are using a domain or subdomain you need to add an additional line to tell the script which email address to send the results to, like this:
<form method=post action="http://www.iinet.net.au/bin/mail"> <input type=hidden name="destination" value="mailbox@some-domain.com">This would send the results of your form to the email address "mailbox@some-domain.com".
Extra mailform fields There are several special fields in the form that you can use with this script:
| field | description |
|---|---|
| destination |
As mentioned above, this is the email address to send the results
of the form to. If you do not provide it, the program will try to
guess the correct email address. This is username@iinet.net.au
if you are using the script on an iiNet client home page (if your
website URL is something like http://www.iinet.net.au/~username/).
To send the results to multiple addresses separate them with a comma (,).
Important Note: If you are using a domain or subdomain and you do not provide a destination, the mail is trashed without warning. |
| subject | This sets the subject of the email you will receive when the form is submitted |
| resultpage | A URL to a page that the client should see once the form is completed. If omitted a standard page will appear saying the form has been submitted |
| sort |
If supplied, this is a comma delimited list of the way in which
you want the fields sorted.
Say for example you had the fields called "dog", "cat", "giraffe" and "aardvark", and wanted them in that order. You would specify You can also specify alphabetical to have them in alphabetical order, or standard to have them in the order they were set out in the form. |
| mode | If there is a field called mode, with a value of 1, then rather than the standard email display, the results will be in a format that is more readily processed to insert into a database. |
| required |
If supplied, this is a comma delimited list of fields that are mandatory
on the form. i.e. if you specify |
| The email address you want the email to originate from. |
You can use these fields like this:
<input type="hidden" name="destination" value="mailbox@some-domain.com">This hides these special fields so the person using the form is unaware they exist.
