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[Note from Jeanie: I chose this article just to give you a flavor of consideration for this particular html form, which is quite prevalent and also problematic, especially because of spamming. After deciding to include this article, I discovered a powerful script called My Contact Station which allows you to receive email from website visitors that stops the spam robots and significantly reduces other spam. Jim has a variety of forms available, so I wanted to introduce you to him this way.]

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What Is Formmail And How Does It Work?

By Jim Pretin


If you need to add an HTML form to your website, then you are going to need a PHP file commonly known as Formmail, which processes the HTML form and sends the results to you via email. Before using formmail, you need to understand how it works and what you need to do before installing it on your website.

To create a Formmail file, you can either write the PHP code yourself (which is impossible unless you are experienced), or you can download the code from one of the many sites that have made the code available. After you download it, you will need to modify the code in order to adapt it to the form you have created.

The first challenge you will face is changing the code, if need be, so that it automatically checks to make sure that all required fields from your form have been completed. Some versions of Formmail automatically include this code, some do not. If it does not include this code, you will need to hire a programmer to create it, or ask someone on a programming message board to help you with it.

The next challenge you will face is writing the code that will create the email message containing the answers to the form and send it to the email address you specified in the code for your HTML form. This is extremely difficult to do if you are not familiar with PHP. Again, you will need the help of a programmer if you can not do it.

Also, you will need to make sure that included, somewhere in the code, is protection against spammers who will try to send spam through your form by altering the recipient field. To prevent this, you need to create a variable in the Formmail file that authorizes only the email address you are using as the recipient. For example, if you have set up your form so that the results will be sent to your Yahoo email account, then you need to insert some code into the Formmail file that prevents the form from being submitted unless your Yahoo email account is the recipient. If you do not this, people will be able to send spam right through your form, which brings us to another important point.

Because it is possible to send spam through a form if the Formmail file is not created properly and does not authorize only one email address as the recipient, a few web hosting companies do not allow their customers to run forms on their sites. Or, they use their own PHP files to process your form, which gives you less flexibility. The better web hosting companies all allow forms and allow you to create your own formmail file to process your HTML form. The better web hosting companies also have extensive firewall protection built into their servers to prevent spam if a form is vulnerable.

I hope this information will help you set up Formmail on your website to process your HTML form. Call your hosting company and ask them if they currently have your site hosted on a server that can process forms. If they do not allow their customers to process forms or have certain rules that restrict your flexibility, you should switch to a better hosting provider that will allow you to use Formmail.

 

Author: Jim Pretin is the owner of http://www.forms4free.com, a service that helps programmers create a free HTML form with the code to email the HTML form responses.

(Jim gives you permission to use this article at your web site, provided you publish the article as presented, with no changes, including the active hyperlink. Please remove Jeanie's note before the article before publishing the article.)

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Beast-Blog.com
Mike Cherim's Professional and Personal Web Log

&bull Killing Off Web Widows
Please, let me explain. I speak not of wives without husbands. I am instead talking about a typographers' term that defines an undesirable situation that looks bad in print and is best avoided for reasons of both aesthetics and readability. The term pertains primarily to print as said, but it also applies to a web page situation that, in my opinion, is also best avoided. I'm not going to provide graphical example of the aforementioned malady, but I will offer a quick definition of the term I've introduced you to.
&bull Protecting Forms from Spam ?Bots
Spam robots or spam 'bots abuse comment forms, contact forms, and any forms they can. A true scourge of the web. They exploit insecure forms to send spam. Fortunately there are individual methods of slowing them down. And when used jointly, 'bots can actually be stopped. This post shares four scripted operations I've found particularly helpful to prevent illegitimate posting. In the following examples, at least one variable will be posted, and will appear in this article as $posted_var (meaning it's captured by $_POST['var']) to offer greater clarity, but this variable can be whatever you need it to be: name, email, etc.
&bull Will the Road to HTML 5 be Rough?
I am really impressed with the HTML 5 work being performed by Ian Hickson, as the draft editor, and the others who are part of the WHATWG. I'm a fan of the work, and I believe it has promise. From the updated meaning of some of those gray area elements, to the deprecation (made obsolete) of some of the garbage that has littered the web for the past fifteen years, to the introduction of new elements that will offer organizational value where none exists today, to the introduction of new attributes to give all elements clearer meaning, it all bodes well with me. But I cannot help but wonder how we will get there.
&bull The Minutiae Motherload
It's time to get a couple of nasty old Post-It notes off my desk. They're dusty and faded, they no longer stick to anything, and their edges are curled. A sad and all too typical sight no doubt. On them I see what may be little nuggets of one man's wisdom, and maybe a question or two (hard to read). Some of it is crap, some of it is gold, that is up to you. Since none is really worthy of an article of its own, I locked them away in a Post-It note safe so to speak. I am now opening that safe -- and the contents are spilling out. If something looks good to you, feel free to grab it.
&bull Goodbye Free Email
Worldwide email spam volume has grown to unprecedented proportions and something must be done. Something will be. Beginning August 1st, 2008, an action initiated by the International Consortium of Email Regulation (ICER), of Geneva, Switzerland -- supported by leaders in all continents -- will be effected. Precisely this action will be the application of outbound email charges levied by major telecom and cable communications carriers, billed to users (per email or in bulk mail lots) by Internet Service Providers (ISP), and metered at the mail server level.
&bull Views From a Screen Reader User
As it concerns using lists and other non-form structural elements to lay out web forms, my feelings have been known. They haven't changed, but after interviewing an experienced screen reader user about this very subject recently, I do have new insights into it -- his perspective anyway. It was a revealing interview. Offering without a doubt relief to some, and probably disappointment to others. Any earned responses will likely determine that.
&bull Making Bad Images Look a Little Better
This is a technique I use to make less than great images look a little better. Bear in mind this isn't a good technique for print-quality images, nor is it terribly helpful for really large images where down-to-the-pixel perfection is required, but for web-use images under 800x600, this can be a real time saver -- a down and dirty technique -- with no heavy tools required, meaning most mid-range image editing software can handle this. Here's how it's done... In six, or so, easy steps. A poor man's technique. (Dial-up users: This post contains ~130kb of images.)

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