[Psychonaut]

As I am a begining HTML student it has proven hard to delve into CGI and Perl and still keep my senses. My objective is to implement an HTML form that sends the result to an e-mail address. My question to you all is how can I use a CGI script to accomplish this? Any example scripts?

[ameat]

Originally posted by Psychonaut:
As I am a begining HTML student it has proven hard to delve into CGI and Perl and still keep my senses. My objective is to implement an HTML form that sends the result to an e-mail address. My question to you all is how can I use a CGI script to accomplish this? Any example scripts?

...i haven't tested the following but it should work; albeit crudely. you might want to look into the perldoc pages for CGI.pm: http://perldoc.com/perl5.8.0/lib/CGI.html for a bit more customization of your output. you might also want to redirect your user to another page after submitting their data.

(disregard the php tagging...the syntax for basic perl and php are close enough that it allows us to get some pretty syntax coloring...)

hope this helps,
amit

[php]
#!/usr/bin/perl -wT

use Strict;
use CGI;

my $q = new CGI();

# Generate your email body...
# The Dump() method prints out all
# submitted name value pairs.
my $toMail = $query->Dump();

# Send it...
open (MAIL,"|/usr/sbin/sendmail -t") or die "Unable to open email: $!";
print MAIL $toMail;
close(MAIL);

exit(0);
[/php]

[Simon Mundy]

PLEASE! PLEASE! For the love of god don't use the formmail.pl script from Matt's Archive. At least if it isn't configured properly.

We've just had a lengthly and costly problem with our web hosting company where a security hole can lead to people abusing this script to send spam. It's to do with the fact you can send all sorts of form values to set the parameters of the script and it's trivial to bypass any 'security' measures it may have.

Write yer own and make it secure!

[Arkham_c]

There are numerous scripts out there to send a form via email. I would say this -- CGI is a dinosaur these days. Most people would solve this problem with PHP, JSP, servlets, ColdFusion, or some other application server solution rather than strict CGI. CGI has lots of serious limitations, including security and performance.

[philzilla]

Originally posted by Simon Mundy:
PLEASE! PLEASE! For the love of god don't use the formmail.pl script from Matt's Archive. At least if it isn't configured properly.

what he said!

check out the rewritten version, by the London Perl Mongers. you can find replacements for all Matt's scripts there