Forms-to-Email Programs
Web Marketing Today, Issue 59, August 1, 1999
What is involved in collecting site visitor information from a technical point of view? You'll need a generic forms-to-email program that collects information in discrete fields and sends that information to you via e-mail. The better programs also write this information to an online database.
Here are several good forms-to-email programs that I have successfully used as a business site developer:
Cgiemail
Cgiemail (http://web.mit.edu/wwwdev/cgiemail/), written by Bruce Lewis and developed at MIT, is a freeware CGI program written in C language and must be compiled in your website's cgi-bin directory. It is fast, and allows a number of options, such as required fields, referral to a new page after filling out the form, easy formatting of e-mail messages, and does support writing to a text file in lieu of e-mailing information to the siteowner. It is pretty easy to set up new forms once the program is installed on your server. You can only install the program on a Unix server.
FormMail.pl
FormMail.pl (http://www.worldwidemart.com/scripts/formmail.shtml), written by Matt Wright in Perl 4+, can perform many forms-to-email tasks with flexibility. It is weak on e-mail message formatting, however, and does not write input data to a database file. There are versions of this program for both Unix and NT servers.
FormHandler.cgi
FormHandler.cgi is my favorite, and is available for use by owners of Craig Patchett and Matt Wright's CGI/Perl Cookbook (Wiley, 1997). I believe that FormHandler is well worth the price of the book.
FormHandler.cgi is a juiced-up version of FormMail.pl by Matt Wright, compatible with either Perl 4 or Perl 5, but adds many valuable features: extensive customization of an e-mail message reply to the visitor as well as a different template for information sent to the site owner, customized thank you pages that can use information the visitor has entered, and customized writing of data to log files for later download. One of the features I really appreciate is a subroutine that checks e-mail addresses for basic validity. It rejects invalid formats, such as e-mail addresses that don't contain a @ sign (a common problem for AOL newbies) or with spaces or forbidden characters. The program runs on both Unix and NT servers.
Since FormHandler.cgi allows such a fine degree of customization, it's easy to make little errors in setting up and testing a form -- Cgiemail is much more straightforward -- but the flexibility is worth the extra work. If you've never worked with CGI programs, ask your ISP or programmer to install the program for you in your cgi-bin directory (though it installs fairly easily), but if you maintain your own website this program is worth getting, learning, and using. You can purchase the CGI/Perl Cookbook from Amazon.com at a discount with this link. It is Amazon's most popular CGI book.
Other Forms Programs
A number of companies offer to take some of the detail work out of setting up and using forms, and offer some sophisticated products. One of these is FormServ (http://www.formserv.com/) that allows you to track, target and respond to visitors who submit forms or orders at your web site.
Microsoft FrontPage 97+ offers a bot or component that allows you to collect data via e-mail from forms, but only when hosted on a server set up with the appropriate extensions. Note: some components won't run at all on Unix servers, but require an NT server to operate correctly. (Incidentally, I do not recommend FrontPage 97 or 98 to my clients, since it breaks HTML templates with its own preferences, but I do recommend FrontPage 2000 as an excellent and flexible webpage editor -- third time's the charm!)
To maximize Web marketing's punch, you need a good left hook from e-mail. Get the most out of forms-to-email programs on your site.
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