Sending Web Form Data by Email

A friend asked me for some software advice:

I need a CGI for taking a simple web form (name, address, phone, email, etc.) and sending the data to a specific email destination in a format that could be loaded into excel or a database. Ideally, I'd like the email address (in the form) validated for basic address compliance.

This would be running on a Mac OS X Server (Tiger) w/Apache, Perl 5.8.6, mod_perl.

I could write that myself, but it just so happens that I know of two programs to recommend.

TMail

The first is tmail (for "Template Mail"). TMail is lightweight and simple to use. It's written in Perl.

Tmail is executed as the result of an HTML Form, and reads a specified text file as a template. Tokens specified in the template file between square brackets are replaced with the values of parameters by those names entered in the form. The results are then mailed via sendmail.

Tmail was written by Leo A. Notenboom, owner of Puget Sound Software, LLC, to take the place of a common C-language CGI program, cgiemail, which was identified as having some security issues.

I used TMail extensively from mailing list subscription forms (until I moved all of my mailing lists to Google Groups).

Super Simple Survey

If you want to create a more complicated form, e.g. a feedback form or survey, with radio buttons, check boxes, text fields and menus, try Super Simple Survey (SSS), freely available from Adaptive Business Designs.

The author describes SSS:

I've always wanted an easy way to do flexible, custom surveys without having to setup a complex mySQL front end. Therefore this script was born.

The goal is to allow you to create simple, flexible form-based surveys with little to no work (or coding).

Some PHP knowledge is helpful, HTML definitely is useful if you want something outside of the default template pages, but installation is a breeze.

It's a small script (less than 50k zipped), comes with full instructions and a sample template. I've released it under the GPL which is also enclosed within the zip file.

I used SSS for a "satisfaction feedback" survey form at a previous job. It was simple to install and use.

However, for my use, I made some enhancements and modifications to the code. I added two new field types (comment and checkboxset), improved the numbering of questions, added support for required fields, and implemented discovery and support of sites using the HTTPS protocol.

Sending Web Form Data by Email ( in category Computerware , WebTech ) - posted at Fri, 30 Dec, 00:34 Pacific | «e»