Need a contact form for my web site

[iorgobe13]

Hello,

I need a contact form on my website, that will send to my email address what the visitor enter in the form fields. The problem is that I can't run any php scripts.. is there a way to use some html form?

[REW Anthony]

You can accomplish this in a couple of ways but the one I think is easiest for your task is to use a PERL CGI script.

Either of these solutions should work nicely for you. They do not require PHP however they do require CGI support. Most web hosts allow for CGI scripts. Should these not work for you or not supported by your hosting provider I would suggest calling up your web host and asking them. They probably already have an accepted solution for this task.

http://www.boutell.com/email/
http://www.scriptarchive.com/formmail.html

[iorgobe13]

Thank you for your suggestions! I found a site that offers remotely hosted contact forms, www. emailmeform .com . Basically, I paste the html code in my website, and it calls the php script on their server who sends the email.

[VRI]

The mail would be sent by their server, but I would caution that any information passed could be, as well, passed to them and that generally it's a bad idea to allow your information to be processed on another's site.

With something as simple as this it would seem that you'd want to keep everything in house (It seems that there would have to be a reference to their site on your form). If you're on a windows server, I'd be glad to pm you what I use for CDOSYS or ASPEmail... if not have you tried googling it?

[REW Anthony]

Sounds easy enough.

Although this raises a few flags in my head and I would ask you to be a bit cautious.

1. What reason does this company have for providing such a free service?
2. What do they get out of it?

Those were the first questions that popped into my mind. Sounds like a great way to collect people's email addresses for targeted spamming purposes. The site also does not have many back links so it was hard to find out how popular they are.

[ezguy]

i guess in the form tage us post="mailto:email@addres.com" will do the job i guess

[REW Fergus]

ezguy, I think you mean this:

<form action="mailto:info@example.com">

This has been discussed previously on the forum. It has its benefits, but it also has some drawbacks. If a user is hosted by a provider who doesn't offer some form of scripting, the most common being PHP, that user should probably look for a new host.

[REW Anthony]

Using <form action="mailto:info@example.com">

pops up some ugly looking security prompts on some machines that scare off people.

iorgobe13: have you singled out using CGI? I highly recommend asking your provider as this is a mature technology that all servers usually support.

[REW Fergus]

It sure does, Anthony. That's in part why I referenced the other discussion. But it does have a couple advantages: it's handled by the browser, thus not subject to capricious server configuration choices; additionally, it doesn't require any coding knowledge to use.

[AaronSOLD]

Also keep in mind that email addresses on web sites are prime targets for spam... that makes the right form script better...