The original author of cgiemail, Bruce Lewis, is no longer working for MIT. Although cgiemail does have an official maintainer on the MIT I/S staff, there are no firm plans for future development, and support is limited/slow. For more information visit the cgiemail homepage. The instructions were reformatted for the web and slightly modified to fit NMSU-A's purposes.

1. Create an e-mail template.

Before you start receiving e-mail messages through the web, you should decide what these messages should look like. Create an ASCII file, called an e-mail template, that looks something like this: 

To: user@nmsua.nmsu.edu                HEADER LINES
From: [required-email] ([required-name])
Subject: survey
                                        blank line
What is your name?            [required-yourname]
What is your quest?           [quest]     BODY
What is your favorite color?  [color]

In one sense, this template is free-form. People who want to send you e-mail can download this template, fill it out, and mail it to you. However, the template will also be used by the cgiemail program, so before you upload the file to your WWW server, be careful to follow these guidelines:

  1. Wherever you want the user of your form to supply information, use a single word inside square brackets with no spaces, e.g. Your name: [required-yourname]. Not [Put your name here]. *(Note required- before any field name is only necessary for required information. If the field is not filled in an error message will display.)
  2. Make sure the address in the To: field is correct.
  3. If there are blank lines among the header lines, remove them.
  4. If there are blank lines before the header lines, remove them.
  5. Make sure all your header lines are valid. The first character on the line must be a letter. Most information should go in the message body; don't make up your own headers.
  6. Make sure there is a blank line between the header lines and the body.
  7. Make sure you save it as ASCII text. For example, if you are using Microsoft Word, use "Save As" and choose "Text Only with Line Breaks."
  8. If you created the file on a Mac, be sure to upload it as text, i.e. CR's translated. (Unix computers have different codes denoting the end of a line than Mac's do, so your file might look like one long line to the Unix computer.)

Within these guidelines there is a lot of flexibility. You can put Bcc:, X-Face:, or any other header in the headers. You can put things like Cc: [yourname] in the headers. Be creative. Just don't put anything in there you wouldn't want your webmaster to see, because that's where bounced messages go.

Now go ahead and upload your e-mail template to the WWW server and look at it with your WWW browser.

2. Put a link to the template on your page.

Here's an example:

Would you like to cross the bridge? Download my "survey" form and send it to <user@nmsua.nmsu.edu>. (This is not an actual mail link.)

Even after you create your WWW form, you will want to leave this link in to increase accessibility to users with disabilities.

3. Decide if a mailto: link will do.

Already, without any complicated HTML, you have a way for people on the WWW to send you the information you want. Before you go to the effort of making an HTML form, decide if it's really worth it. Forms on the WWW have two particular disadvantages:

  1. You will get a lot of frivolous e-mail from people who are merely "surfing the web."
  2. The user's e-mail address is typed manually, and is often mistyped, so that you have no way to reply. This is less of a problem with mailto: links.

4. Create the HTML form.

If you've decided to create an HTML form, you need to give people a way to supply an e-mail address. With the mailto: link, their mailer would supply the From: address for them. But now you need to add a line to the top of your e-mail template like this:

From: (email)

Here is an example HTML form.

Form Example

Your e-mail address:

Your name:

Your quest:

Your favorite color:

  

(This example doesn't actually send e-mail.)

This is the HTML source:

<form method="post"
      action="http://alamo.nmsu.edu/cgi-bin/cgiemail/yourfolder/template.txt">

Your e-mail address: <INPUT NAME="required-email"><p>
Your name: <INPUT NAME="required-yourname"><p>

Your quest: <INPUT NAME="quest"><p>
Your favorite color: <INPUT NAME="color"><p>
<INPUT TYPE="submit" value="Send e-mail"><INPUT TYPE="reset" value="reset">
</FORM>

This is a very simple example. Note that the NAME of each input corresponds to what you previously put in the e-mail template. In this example they are required-email, required-yourname, quest, and color. This is the key concept in using cgiemail. Be careful to make them exactly the same; if you put NAME="color" in your HTML form and [colour] (note the spelling difference) in your e-mail template, the input will not show up in the e-mail.

5. Create more advanced HTML forms.

To learn to create more complicated forms, read NCSA's guide and/or an HTML book. All of their example forms can be converted to cgiemail forms merely by changing the ACTION. Unlike other forms-to-email programs, you are not required to use hidden inputs with special names.

All types of inputs (radio buttons, etc.) work the same way. Each input needs a NAME, and that name must appear within square brackets in your e-mail template. It's that simple. To get more ideas, see the cgiemail example page.

6. Make sure the ACTION is correct.

The trickiest part of the HTML form is getting the ACTION set correctly. Start with the URL of your e-mail template, then split it into two parts, e.g.

http://alamo.nmsu.edu/cgi-bin/cgiemail/yourfolder/survey.txt
\                   /\                                     /
 `----- Part 1 ----'  ` ------------- Part 2 -------------'

First type the URL of your e-mail template into a web browser and make sure it's correct. Then put the script name in the middle. Usually this is ``/cgi-bin/cgiecho'', but it depends on how your server is configured. On alamo.nmsu.edu it happens to be ``/cgi-bin/cgiecho'', thus my ACTION looks like this:

http://alamo.nmsu.edu/cgi-bin/cgiecho/cgi-bin/cgiemail/yourfolder/survey.txt
\                   /\              /\                                      /
 `---- Part 1 -----'  --script name-- ` ------------- Part 2 --------------'

For simplicity, you may leave out part 1, but you must include it if you want to test your form as a local file. If you don't know what that means, just feel free to omit part 1.

7. Try out your form with cgiecho.

Pop your form into your favorite WWW browser, fill in the inputs, and submit it. You should see what the processed form looks like. If instead you see an error with a number near 500, your ACTION is probably set wrong. Go back to the previous step.

If some of your inputs don't seem to be showing up in the processed form, make sure that the inputs have the exact same names in the HTML form as in the ASCII template. E.g. NAME="required-yourname" in the HTML form and [required-yourname] in the e-mail template.

8. Go live with cgiemail.

Now change cgiecho to cgiemail in the ACTION of your HTML form. Try it out. You should receive an e-mail message with the processed form. If you get a success page but don't receive mail, there is some problem with your template file. Go back and make sure you correctly followed the guidelines in step 1.

If it works, congratulations!

9. Debug if you don't get mail

Normally, mail gets sent asynchronously, meaning it goes into a queue to be sent at at a convenient time. Asynchronous mail is sent more efficiently and reliably, but has the disadvantage that problems can only be reported by mailing an error message back to the sender. To the mail system, it appears that the sender of the mail is the web server, so the error message won't get to you.

If you are getting a success message but aren't getting mail, you can temporarily use synchronous mail delivery by creating a hidden input named cgiemail-mailopt and giving it a value containing "sync", e.g.

<INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="cgiemail-mailopt" VALUE="sync">

Be sure to remove this variable when you are done debugging, because it slows things down for the end user and possibly for the mail system.

Note: For release 1.1 and prior, this won't work. Ask your webmaster to install a newer release. Some mailers have a nonstandard extension that sends bounces to an address in an Errors-To: header, so you might try using that header in your template if you're stuck with an old version of cgiemail. However, some errors make this header line unreadable, so there's no way to make absolutely sure the bounce will go to you.