How to Send Data from a From via E-Mail
First of all you have to create a web page with a form in your favorite HTML editor. If you want to find out how to create a form with Microsoft FrontPage XP 2003, click here to see our tutorial. In this text, we are using screen captures from FrontPage 98 for Microsoft Windows. You will learn how to set up the form to let people send data filled in the form to you via email.
Specify the Form Handler
- In FrontPage, right-click inside of the form and select the Form Properties option from the pop-up menu.
- The dialog box should appear as follows:
- Choose Send to Other in the upper part of the dialog box and make sure that the option Custom ISAPI, NSAPI, CGI or ASP Script is selected in the drop-down menu.
- Click the Options button. You will see this dialog box:
- In the Action field, type
http://www.union.edu/RESOURCES/curriculum/cgi/mailform.php - Make sure that option POST is selected in Method drop-down menu.
- Click OKto close the Options dialog box.
Specify your E-Mail Address
Now we need to insert a hidden field with your email address into the form.
- From the Form Properties dialog box click Advanced button, you will see this dialog box:
- Click the Add button to open a dialog box for new field.
- The field has to be named EMAIL (in capital letters).
- Now type your email address in the Value field and click OK.
- If you would like to change the value later, choose the field in the Advanced Form Properties window and click Modify.
- To close Advanced Form Properties window click OK again.
Specify GOTO Field
After the e-mail is sent, the web browser is to be redirected to www.union.edu. If you would like to redirect the browser to another webpage, create a hidden field named GOTO (in capital letters) with the address of webpage as its value.
More Form Properties
You always have to create a field named EMAIL in your form, when you want to send the data by email, but then there are also several more fields that don't have to be used.
SUBJECT field
Without specifying this field, all emails will be send with subject "Web form data". You may want to change it for example, if you have more web pages with form on the web you can assign different subjects to emails from different pages.
To set up the e-mail subject add a new hidden field (the same way as you did it for the EMAIL field), the field has to be named SUBJECT (in capital letters) and its value is the subject of the email.
All emails sent from the form has an anonymous@union.edu as a sender. If you want to let people specify their email you should create a field named FROM (capital letters) and let people type their email address into this field. It doesn't make sense to create this field as a hidden field, so I would suggest you to create it as a normal text field.