Email Form and Outlook

[firefly]

I've created a form that supposed to send an email to a specific email address. Everything works fine except that when the email is received from Outlook I get an attachment instead of the text. The email sends correctly when you look at the email as plain text. Is there any way to be able to view these emails in Outlook? Or any way to change the format so that they can be received in Outlook?

The form can be found at <snip>. If there is anyone that can help I'd greatly appreciate it. I've been racking my brain for over three days on this.

Any help would be extremely grateful!

Thanks so much.
firefly

[edited by: oilman at 4:35 pm (utc) on May 28, 2003]

[Chuma]

That's usual for sending form data to Outlook.

If it is available I would use a scripting language to send the email so you can set the formatting of the message and the fields used (it would also allow you to check for a valid email.)

Thanks.

[ritch_b]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld Firefly!

You might want to give some consideration to using a basic form script like formmail or similar - that's on the premise that you have a cgi-bin for the domain. Pretty straightforward to do however and gives much more control than using the "mailto" for the form. Using the site search will undoubtedly reveal more information.

R.

Whilst I think on, you might want to remove the urls from your post as dropping them in like that can be a bit of a no-no ;)

[firefly]

ooo... didn't realize it was a no-no, apologize for that. and thank you for the advice. i've been looking into some cgi formmail scripts that are easy to install. the problem is that i don't know all of the information for the "work" site like i do for my personal site. so gaining access and knowing exactly where to put the script on the "work" site is going to be a bigger pain that i ever thought possible.

*sigh* i get to sit on the phone with a tech person who doesn't have a clue what i'm talking about... joy of all joys.

[Powdork]

Somewhat along this topic. i do use Matt's formmail. Currently the forms are sent to my address and i forward them to the vendors that were checked by the sender. Where I am having a problem is getting the original senders address into the "from" box so that the vendors can reply directly to the emails rather than creating a new doc. The first field of the form is
Please reply to this Address: senders address here
Still, even after emailing the vendors and making them aware of this, they still reply back to me instead.
TIA

[MWpro]

I would recommend just using a simple php script to send the message. If you don't know how to script it, just search on google for some simple php form processing tutorials and you should be able to pick it up very quickly.

Using mailto: is never a good idea, especially since they would have to log into outlook first, type the message again, etc... and if they didn't have outlook or an isp that would create the mail, then nothing would happen.

I have used both formmail and a php script... comparing them, the php script is much smaller, easier to understand, and very easy to set up... it is also convienant if you need to use different forms on other pages, as you can modify what fields to include very easily.

[Powdork]

I would recommend just using a simple php script to send the message. If you don't know how to script it, just search on google for some simple php form processing tutorials and you should be able to pick it up very quickly.

Thanks MWpro,
I have about 35 vendors on my niche directory site. The form allows the sender to complete the message and then check the boxes next to each vendor they want to receive the message. There is also a submit to all box which would need to send mail to all the vendors. Would a relatively simple php script be able to handle that?
Thanks

[MWpro]

Yes definately, I made a script the other day similar to what you're asking for, except it uses pull down menus instead of checkboxes. Good thing is it can send them to them automatically. Sticky mail me if you are interested and I can show you the code that I used and you will probably be able to adapt it for the checkboxes.