R4L/Services/Hosting/Basic/FormMail

Form Mail

The following are working examples of HTML code you can use to create a form on your website. When your visitor submits this form, you will receive an email with the contents of what they submitted in the form. These forms can be used as a contact me page or other uses.

Form Mail with Captcha

A Captcha is a random set of characters that is generated on the form page that your visitor needs to type in correctly in order for the form to be processed. This technique helps reduce use of the form by automated programs that generate spam.
In this example scripts, you of course need to replace your-domain.com with your actual domain name.
When you implement your form, we recommend you start with the example script

 <form action="/cgi-bin/form-captcha.cgi" method="POST">
  <input type="hidden" name="recipient" value="you@your-domain.com">
  <input type="hidden" name="subject" value="Web contact: http://your-domain.com">
  <input type="hidden" name="env_report" value="REMOTE_HOST,REMOTE_ADDR,HTTP_USER_AGENT">
  <table border="0" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="3" width="650">
    <tr>
      <td class="right">Name:</td>
      <td><input type="text" size="30" maxlength="100" name="name"></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td class="right">Mailing Address:</font></td>
      <td><input type="text" size="20" maxlength="100" name="address"></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td class="right">City:</font></td>
      <td><input type="text" size="20" maxlength="100" name="city"></td>
    </tr>            <tr>
      <td class="right">State:</font></td>
      <td><input type="text" size="15" maxlength="100" name="city1"></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td class="right">Zip or Postal Code:</font></td>
      <td><input type="text" size="11" maxlength="10" name="zip"></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td class="right">Phone:</font></td>
      <td><input type="text" size="15" maxlength="20" name="phone"></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td class="right">e-mail:</font></td>
      <td><input type="text" size="20" maxlength="100" name="visitor_email"></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td class="right" width="50%"><font size="3" face="arial">To prevent automated posts, please enter the text shown on the image as the verification code below.</font></td>
      <td width="50%"><font size="3" face="arial"><strong><img src="/cgi-bin/captcha.cgi" border="1"></strong></font></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td class="right"><font size="3" face="arial"><strong>Verification Code:</strong></font></td>
      <td><font size="3" face="arial"><input type="text" size="8" maxlength="20" name="verifytext" ></font></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
    <td class="right">Feedback:</font></td>
    <td><textarea rows="8" name="feedback" cols="40"></textarea> </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td class="center" colspan="2"><input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit"></td>
    </tr>
  </table>
</form>

Form Mail without Captcha

To create a contact form without Captcha (not recommended, as it's more prone to abuse by spammers), you can use this following sample code.

<form name="web_email" method="post" action="/cgi-bin/form-mail.cgi">
  <input type="hidden" name="recipient" value="you@your-domain.com">
  <input type="hidden" name="subject" value="Web contact: http://your-domain.com">
  <input type="hidden" name="required" value="visitor_email,realname,feedback">
  <input type="hidden" name="env_report" value="REMOTE_HOST,REMOTE_ADDR,HTTP_USER_AGENT">
  <blockquote>
    <p>Name: <input type="text" size="27" name="realname" />
    <p>Your Email:<b>*</b><br><input type="text" size="28" name="visitor_email" />
    <p>Have you visited us before?<br />
    <select name="visit">
      <option value="Yes" />Yes
      <option value="No" />No
    </select>
    <p><e>How did you find our web site?</p>
    <select name="refer">
      <option value="search_engine">Search Engine
      <option value="commercial_tv">Television Commercial
      <option value="online_ad">Online ad
      <option value="friend">Friend - Word of mouth
      <option value="other">Other
    </select>
    <p>Enter your question or feedback below:
    <br />
    <textarea rows="8" name="feedback" cols="40"></textarea> <br /><br />
    <input type="submit" value="Send Message" name="send"></p>
  </blockquote>
</form>

Form Mail Optional Fields

In your form, you may use any of the following fields. These apply for both the form mail with and without Captcha.

Field!	Sample!	Description!
email	<input type="text" name="email">	This form field will allow the user to specify their return e-mail address. If you want to be able to return e-mail to your user, I strongly suggest that you include this form field and allow them to fill it in. This will be put into the From: field of the message you receive. If you want to require an email address with valid syntax, add this field name to the 'required' field.
realname	<input type="text" name="realname">	The realname form field will allow the user to input their real name. This field is useful for identification purposes and will also be put into the From: line of your message header.
redirect	<input type="hidden" name="redirect" value="http://your.host.com/to/file.html">	If you wish to redirect the user to a different URL, rather than having them see the default response to the fill-out form, you can use this hidden variable to send them to a pre-made HTML page.
required	<input type="hidden" name="required" value="email,phone">	You can now require for certain fields in your form to be filled in before the user can successfully submit the form. Simply place all field names that you want to be mandatory into this field. If the required fields are not filled in, the user will be notified of what they need to fill in, and a link back to the form they just submitted will be provided. To use a customized error page, see 'missing_fields_redirect'
env_report	<input type="hidden" name="env_report" value="REMOTE_HOST,HTTP_USER_AGENT">	Allows you to have Environment variables included in the e-mail message you receive after a user has filled out your form. Useful if you wish to know what browser they were using, what domain they were coming from or any other attributes associated with environment variables. The following is a short list of valid environment variables that might be useful: REMOTE_HOST - Sends the hostname making the request. REMOTE_ADDR - Sends the IP address of the remote host making the request. REMOTE_USER - If server supports authentication and script is protected, this is the username they have authenticated as. *This is not usually set.* HTTP_USER_AGENT - The browser the client is using to send the request. There are others, but these are a few of the most useful. For more information on environment variables, see: http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi/env.html
sort	<input type="hidden" name="sort" value="alphabetic"> <input type="hidden" name="sort" value="order:name1,name2,etc...">	This field allows you to choose the order in which you wish for your variables to appear in the e-mail that FormMail generates. You can choose to have the field sorted alphabetically or specify a set order in which you want the fields to appear in your mail message. By leaving this field out, the order will simply default to the order in which the browsers sends the information to the script (which is usually the exact same order as they appeared in the form.) When sorting by a set order of fields, you should include the phrase "order:" as the first part of your value for the sort field, and then follow that with the field names you want to be listed in the e-mail message, separated by commas. Version 1.6 allows a little more flexibility in the listing of ordered fields, in that you can include spaces and line breaks in the field without it messing up the sort. This is helpful when you have many form fields and need to insert a line wrap.
print_config	<input type="hidden" name="print_config" value="email,subject">	print_config allows you to specify which of the config variables you would like to have printed in your e-mail message. By default, no config fields are printed to your e-mail. This is because the important form fields, like email, subject, etc. are included in the header of the message. However some users have asked for this option so they can have these fields printed in the body of the message. nfig fields that you wish to have printed should be in the value attribute of your input tag separated by commas.
print_blank_fields	<input type="hidden" name="print_blank_fields" value="1">	print_blank_fields allows you to request that all form fields are printed in the return HTML, regardless of whether or not they were filled in. FormMail defaults to turning this off, so that unused form fields aren't e-mailed.
title	<input type="hidden" name="title" value="Feedback Form Results">	This form field allows you to specify the title and header that will appear on the resulting page if you do not specify a redirect URL.
return_link_url	<input type="hidden" name="return_link_url" value="http://your.host.com/main.html">	This field allows you to specify a URL that will appear, as return_link_title, on the following report page. This field will not be used if you have the redirect field set, but it is useful if you allow the user to receive the report on the following page, but want to offer them a way to get to your main page.
return_link_title	<input type="hidden" name="return_link_title" value="Back to Main Page">	This is the title that will be used to link the user back to the page you specify with return_link_url.
missing_fields_redirect	<input type="hidden" name="missing_fields_redirect" value="http://your.host.com/error.html">	This form field allows you to specify a URL that users will be redirected to if there are fields listed in the required form field that are not filled in. This is so you can customize an error page instead of displaying the default.
background	<input"hidden" name="background" value="http://your.host.xxx/image.gif">	This form field allow you to specify a background image that will appear if you do not have the redirect field set. This image will appear as the background to the form results page.
bgcolor	<input type="hidden" name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFCC">	This form field allows you to specify a background colour for the form results page in much the same way you would specify the background image.
text_color	<input type="hidden" name="link_color" value="#FF0000">	Changes the color of links on the resulting page. Works in the same way as text_color. Should not be defined if redirect is.
vlink_color	<input type="hidden" name="vlink_color" value="#0000FF">	Changes the color of visited links on the resulting page. Works exactly the same as link_color.
alink_color	<input type="hidden" name="alink_color" value="#0000FF">	Changes the color of active links on the resulting page. Works exactly the same as link_color.