Re: Processing Website Forms

From: MindShift Design <teammsd@mindshiftdesign.com>

Date: Tue, 02 Jan 2001 15:26:20 +0000

In article <3A51CC24.35B40371@gamerz.net>,
  rrognlie@gamerz.net wrote:
>
> > When processing a customer form on a web page, its fairly easy to
take the data
> > on the form and email back to an email address and I'm doing that
all the time.
> >
> > But what if, instead of sending the info back as an email (which
seems to be
> > the automatic option), you want to formulate the data into a text
file, attack
> > it to an email, and send the info back as an attachment.  Any
ideas?  Or better
> > still, any source code?  Pretty much any language will do, although
VBScript is
> > my personal preference, I'll work with whatever.
>
> Your answer is not so much programming as it is MIME.  To send an
> attachment
> with a message, you need to either convert the attachment to a
UUencoded
> message
> and include it with the main text of your message (and then hope that
> their mail
> reader groks uuencoding, which most do) or you need to make your
message
> to them
> and multipart mime message...

While Rich is correct, there are some things that will ultimately
decide your course of action.

1) What Operating System does your webserver run off of ? Check with
your ISP if you don�t know, as this will really determine the best and
easiest way to handle this, as well as the webserver. If it�s a *NIX
system most likely it�s Apache they�re running. If it�s NT then it�s
IIS (my apologies <g>).
2) What email system do they have in place to handle SMTP email ?  If
it�s a *NIX based system then there�ll be no problems using sendmail.
On Windows NT systems they may be used Microsoft�s SMTP services (which
are incredibly crappy and broken) or some third party software
3) Which server side languages does the ISP allow you to run with? This
is also dependent upon the OS and webserver they�re running. Vbscript
is only available on NT, though there are multiple flavors of ASP that
you can now get on *NIX systems, but they miss out on the tight COM
integration with NT systems.
4) Does your ISP allow access to third party products like ColdFusion,
Tango or others ? We use ColdFusion for all of our server side
scripting as much as possible. It�s incredibly fast to write solutions
like this with it � this takes would take approx 5 minutes to write in
CF.

Steve, if you want to drop me an email out of USENET, I�ll do what I
can to help out with this.

--
Jason Paul McCartan - jasonm@mindshiftdesign.com
MindShift Design LLC
http://www.mindshiftdesign.com

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References

Processing Website Forms
madcentral@aol.com (MadCentral)
Tue, 02 Jan 2001 12:20:55 +0000
Re: Processing Website Forms
rrognlie@gamerz.net
Tue, 02 Jan 2001 12:40:04 +0000