CGI Programming OpenFAQ

How can users send me comments and/or email?

Contributors:

boutell boutell@boutell.com
David_Beroff david@note.com

There are two ways:

Using a mailto: URL

You can simply create a link which looks like this:

This works great for browsers that support the mailto: URL. Perhaps Perhaps 95% of web users will be able to use such a link. A few older browsers do not support it, but giving out an email address is often a reasonable backup.

Installing a comment form

If you have access to the server's configuration files, or if your server administrator permits users to create their own CGI scripts, you can create a form which sends mail to you from any browser that supports forms. A really flexible package for this is the mit-dcns-cgi package (URL is <URL:http://web.mit.edu/wwwdev/cgiemail/> ). I've written a simple email forms package (URL is <URL:http://www.boutell.com/email/> ), which does it in ANSI C. Many other such packages exist.

GetComments (URL is <URL:http://seclab.cs.ucdavis.edu/~hoagland/>) is a more general package, written in Perl, which can do many different things in response to a form submission.

InfoMania offers a tool called Uniform which automatically formats e-mail based on the input received from a form posting. This "one size fits all" CGI program is a convenient alternative to writing custom CGI programs. <URL:http://www.mornini.com/>

FreeForm (URL is <URL:http://www.note.com/success/public/freeform/?openfaq>) is a service which is provided to web content publishers, allowing them to add free fill-out forms to their site. They can get feedback from their site's visitors, without needing to access CGI on their provider's server, or to even know CGI.

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