Making Forms Active

Though it is easy to construct a form, making a form active is another story. One very nice approach, providing you have access to your server's cgi-bin directory, is to use Perl. There was a great program available on the Web to make forms active, a perl script -- Matt's FormMail. Unfortunately recently a serious security flaw has been discovered with its use. You can access a secure but limited version either on my site or at the UMUC site (see below). I'm exploring alternates to Matt's FormMail but so far I have not discovered a suitable one that is generally available.

A step-by-step procedure

1. Include the following two lines at the beginning of your form.

1.1 <FORM ACTION="location of the program that will process the data from the form"  METHOD="POST">

In my case this is:
<FORM ACTION="http://polaris.umuc.edu/cgi-bin/cgiwrap /flazarus/FormMail.pl" METHOD="POST">

You should use this same construct to make use of the script on my site or:
<FORM ACTION="http://www.umuc.edu/cgi-bin/FormMail.pl" METHOD="POST">
for UMUC's site.

1.2 <INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN  NAME="recipient"  VALUE="email@ your.host.com">

In my case this is:
<INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN NAME="recipient" VALUE="flazarus@polaris.umuc.edu">

The purpose for the hidden field is to store values that need to be sent to the server along with the form submission, but shouldn't be displayed by the web browser. For you to receive the data from this form you would of course use your email address.

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