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!).

A good place to have a look at how forms work and learn about form tags is:

• http://www.ithaca.edu/computing/quick_guides/web_publishing/forms/

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">

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">

In conjuction with these, there are several other special fields in the form that you can use with this script:

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 dog,cat,giraffe,aardvark. 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 dog,cat, the form will be rejected unless something is entered in those two fields.
email	The email address you want the email to originate from.

You can use these fields like this:

   destination value="mailbox@some-domain.com">
  

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