Emailing TO a website form (web coding)?

Question

I've got a simple web form that is linked to my company's contact management system. When someone fills out the form the note that they fill in is automatically put into our system. Our system allows for this form to exist in order to receive the data input.

I would like to figure a way that someone can email a dedicated email address (in a properly formatted email I suppose) and the it will (in some way) "fill in" that form (or really just using that form handler to process the email) so as to communicate with our system.

This question cant be answered in completion on here, I doubt its too easy - but I'm hoping to find some starting points I'm having problems even googling it because all I find are form-to-email type results.

The form uses an action method of POST.

Well the script that runs the form is remotely hosted - so tapping into the form POST action is my only way into the system via the web.

The reason I want people to be able to email it is because our company heavily uses blackberries and emailing out notes would be most convienent. When they are in front of a computer (which is rare) they can use the web form - or even enter it directly into our system.

I'm capturing very little data, I want to grab the email address that it is sent from, the subject line would be one field, and the entire body of the email would be entered as one field.

What would you call the email server chain of scripts you are referring to - I do design and html - this side of programming is outside of my knowledge base.

Answer 1

The script handling your web form is remotely hosted, but has access to your 'system'? That sounds odd from a security standpoint.

Anyway, the script handling your web form, or 'WFS', communicates with your 'system' in some fashion. Configure your mail server with an address that delivers to a program instead of a mailbox. That program, the mail processing script 'MPS', will parse the message to produce the same sort of structure that the WFS would produce, and then allow the MPS to access your 'system' in the same way as the WFS.

Note that there is no cookie mechanism for e-mails, so any concepts of maintaining state, authentication, or defending against repeated submissions will need to be reworked for mail handling. Planning for load is comparable, but different for mail processing. You'll also need to consider the effects of spam.

Answer 2

You can't mail to a web form. Neither can you mail to a web page of any kind. But you can, in principle, hook up a mail server into a chain of scripts that can accomplish whatever you need done.

First, craft a dummy response email. Figure out how to format it so it's easy to parse. Then write regular expression-based filters that read in and translate the data. Finally, store it.

But this is an awkward and really error-prone process. Would it not make more sense to email out a note with a web address that contains the form? Anyone with relevant information goes to that page, and from there you can capture and process the information in the usual way, such as with PHP.

Answer 3

This depends hugely on what you have running on your web server, which OS, which web server, which scripting you run. It's not an easy answer, unfortunately.

Answer 4

http://www.jotform.com (free service, free build-it-yourself form)

or

http://www.dtheatre.com/scripts/ (free classic tailor-it to your needs formmail php script)