Feedback forms

[Thomas Dowling]

ACTION="MAILTO:..." is notoriously inflexible as a way to process
forms--you get what you get and that's all that you get.  After all, you're
offloading your forms processing to the browser, so it's only natural to
expect that you have to give up a degree of control.  Not only will any
given browser offer behavior a little different from what you want, but
different browsers will offer different behaviors.  On top of that, some
browsers still don't support this at all.

ACTION="MAILTO" is a quick and dirty solution at best.  My advice is to
insist on CGI access.

If that's completely out of the question, you might want to look for the
munpack utility; it's a Unix command-line MIME unpacker.  You might be able
to pipe the incoming messages through munpack and then attach them to the
end of your ASCII file.

Thomas Dowling                    \ tdowling at ohiolink.edu
Asst. Director, Client/Server Apps.\    614/728-3600 x326
OhioLINK                            \    FAX 614/728-3610



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> From: Dirk van Eylen <Dirk.VanEylen at ping.be>
> To: Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at library.berkeley.edu>
> Subject: Feedback forms
> Date: Thursday, July 18, 1996 12:59 AM
> 
>         Right now I'm experimenting with HTML feedback forms (FORM
> METHOD="POST" ACTION="mailto:Dirk.VanEylen at ping.be"). Since the library
> doesn't have access to CGI, we're thinking about using forms like these
for
> the library and process them off line. The idea is to have a unique
a-mail
> adres in the mailto field so that all incoming messages can be filtered
into
> one mailbox (=one ASCII file). If I have one file I can do the processing
> part making a simple Word-macro (I'm not very technical).What happens
> however is that all forms I fill out and submit come in as attachments to
> messages saying 'Form posted fom Mozilla'.
>         Question : is there any way to avoid the form being send as an
> attachment? Iwant it to appear in the body of the message. Can this be
done?
> If not, what other solutions do you suggest to process the multiple ascII
> attachments into one file that can be importes into a database?
>         Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
>         
>         Dirk van Eylen
>         Dirk.VanEylen at ping.be
>  
>      -------------------------  Dirk van Eylen --- ---------------------
>             Wilselsesteenweg 14, 3010 Kessel-Lo, Belgium
>               tel. : + 32 16 25 96 46 /  fax. : +32 16 25 39 70 
>              De Brakke Hond, literair tijdschrift met neus :
>                 http://www.dma.be/p/amphion/brakke-h
>