setting up an email submission form

[Metjhs23]

Ok, I’m trying to set up a mailing list for my company and I want to gather email addresses via a submission form. Then I can get their email address with a subject line in-box and manipulate the list via Outlook Express & its message rules.

Anyway, what I don’t know is, is it just a simple matter of a form that sends their info to my email account straight from the website? Or do I need space on the server to store it or something? If it is just a form that sends it contents straight to my email account, does anyone know where I can get the html template?

Am I missing any other vital information?

Thanks, Metjh

[Sceiron]

For something this simple you could set your form's ACTION attribute to go directly to your e-mail address:

<form action="mailto:you@domain.com">

The downside to this is that some browsers (notably IE6) will make a big stink and ask the user if it's OK to submit the form via e-mail (for privacy reasons). Depending on their e-mail client, the form fields may be sent in plain text or as an attachment with name/value pairs, which can be a pain to manage manually.

The most elegant solution would be to have a server-side CGI script that would keep the addresses in a database or text file, then sent you a message directly in a specific format. All depends on how much time you want to spend building it I suppose.

[Metjhs23]

Yep, the mailto: form isn't really a decent solution.

Does anyone know of any tutourials or wizards to help with the CGI list setup?

Thanks

[Sceiron]

I don't know of any specific scripts that will do what you need, but you might look around over at www.cgi-resources.com .. they have several thousand scripts in various languages to do just about everything.