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3.1) How do I send mail from a webpage?

You'll want to use the Netmar mail script. It has many powerful features that you can use to set up your webpages and get mail from forms.

Here's how to use it:


Mail Script

Netmar offers one of the most robust and feature-laden FORM-to-Email gateway programs available anywhere on the Internet. The Mail script can process the output of an HTML form, check it against a set of rules to determine whether or not it should be accepted, convert into one or more formatted email messages, and return a formatted response to the browser, complete with data from the form embedded within. It can then repost all of the given data to ANOTHER script for special processing. If that sounds like too much, and you just want to mail a simple form, it can do that too. The Mail script is available by setting your FORM ACTION tag equal to "/cgi-bin/mail" -
<form action="/cgi-bin/mail">

In addition, there are a number of special variables which tell the script how to operate.

Here is a sample form that demonstrates use of all of the mail script's features. Feel free to save and reuse it.

Here are the other files that would go with that form:

mailform.etemp - Used to create the formatted email message.
mailform.phtml - Shown after successful post.
no_name.phtml - Shown when no name is entered.
no_email.phtml - Shown when no email or an invalid email is entered.
no_url.phtml - Shown when no URL or an invalid URL is entered.
no_cc.phtml - Shown when no credit card number or an invalid number is entered.

Synopsis:

The FORM tag must be as follows:

either
<FORM ACTION="/cgi-bin/mail" METHOD="POST">
or
<FORM ACTION="/cgi-bin/mail" METHOD="GET">

All variables must be defined in your form in one of three ways:

Input Type Hidden - This allows you to embed values into your form that don't change.
<input type="hidden" name="VARIABLE" value="VALUE">

Input Type Text - This inserts an input box which allows the user of the form to specify the value of the variable.
<input type="text" name="VARIABLE">

Select - This inserts a drop-down menu that allows the user to choose from a list.
<select name="VARIABLE">
<option> Option 1
<option> Another option
</select>


Variables:

to (required)

Must be set to the destination email address to which contents of the form should be sent.

Any additional email addresses to which the email message should be sent.

The URL or file that will be the "next hop" after the form is submitted. This can either be a URL (starting with http://...), or a local HTML file with or without subcodes. This file should be specified with either its full path (/users/j/johndoe/www/whatever.phtml) or by the full path starting from the DocumentRoot directory of your Virtual Server. For instance, if your Virtual Server points to /users/j/johndoe/www/domain, and your file were located in /users/j/johndoe/www/domain/dir/file.phtml, then you would specify "/dir/file.phtml" as the value of this variable.
If a file is specified, the file is parsed and the values of the other variables in the form may be inserted in the file before output using an advanced parsing engine. See the mail system manual page for details.
If a URL is specified, no parsing is possible. If a file is specified, make sure you use absolute links within it.
If not specified, mail will present a default page that says "Message Sent" and has a link that points to the root of the Virtual Server on which the form was located.

File to be used as a template to construct the outbound email message. Data from the form can be inserted using subcodes (just like the file specified by next). For more info on the parsing engine and how subcodes work, see the mail systeam manual page. This file starts in the header of the email message. This means that the first line of the file is a mail header. The mail header continues until the first blank line. There must be a blank line to separate the header from the body. Typically, The first line would be just the Subject: header. So a template file would start off with a line that reads:

Subject: ${subject}

followed by a blank line. Do not forget to have a blank line after the headers. If you do, your message will fail.

The subject of the form. The value of this variable is used in the subject line of the generated email message if you don't use an email template.

A return (origin) email address, and a file to be used as a template to send an email message to the person filling out the form at the address he/she supplies in the "email" field of the form. The template used follows the exact same parsing conventions as that specified by the "emailtemplate" variable.

Value is of the form: username; keyid
Consists of a username, a semi-colon, and a PGP User ID. The username tells PGP whose public keyring to search. The PGP User ID tells PGP what public key to find in the keyring. The public key is then used to encrypt the body of the email message, which may then only be decrypted by the person(s) holding the corresponding private (secret) key. This encryption allows for the sending of highly sensitive information via email, such as personal and financial information typically accompanying product/service orders.

The name of the person submitting the form. This variable would typically be set using an input box of type text, allowing the submitter to enter their name. It is used to set the name of the sender on the outbound email message.

The email address of the person submitting the form. This variable would typically be set using an input box of type text, allowing the submitter to enter their email address. It is used to set the email address of the sender on the outbound email message so that the message can be replied to.

Value is of the form: variable variable; file
A require rule tells mail not to send any mail if any of the variables listed before the semicolon do not contain any data. If the rule is not satisfied, the file or URL specified after the semicolon is sent instead.

Value is of the form: variable variable; file
An is_email rule tells mail not to send any mail if any of the variables listed before the semicolon do not contain properly formatted Internet email addresses. If the rule is not satisfied, the file or URL specified after the semicolon is sent instead.

Value is of the form: variable variable; file
An is_web rule tells mail not to send any mail if any of the variables listed before the semicolon do not contain properly formatted WWW addresses. If the rule is not satisfied, the file or URL specified after the semicolon is sent instead.

Value is of the form: variable variable; file
An is_ccard rule tells mail not to send any mail if any of the variables listed before the semicolon do not contain a credit card number that passes standard mathematical checksums. This does NOT check to see if the card is active or even exists. Rather, it just checks to see if the number can be used as a valid credit card number. If the rule is not satisfied, the file or URL specified after the semicolon is sent instead.

The URL of another script to which the contents of the form should be posted. This allows you to have the contents of a form mailed to you AND processed by your own script without requiring the user to fillin two forms. To protect against loops, the name of the bgprocess variable is changed to "_bgprocess" before the post is done. Method POST is always used regardless of how the mail script was originally called. The repost is done in the background, and the reponse from the specified script is discarded.

The URL of another script to which the contents of the form should be posted. This allows you to have the contents of a form mailed to you AND processed by your own script without requiring the user to fillin two forms. To protect against loops, the name of the fgprocess variable is changed to "_fgprocess" before the post is done. Method POST is always used regardless of how the mail script was originally called. The repost is done in the foreground, and the response from the specified script is sent directly to the browser, as if the mail script generated it. When fgprocess is used and a valid URL is specified, the next variable is completely ignored.