Re: Webserver - How do I send customised e-mail (not mailto)

From: Billy Verreynne <vslabs_at_onwe.co.za>
Date: 1997/12/09
Message-ID: <66ja4h$npf$1@hermes.is.co.za>#1/1

Chris Smith wrote in message <348C0B71.ECDB5569_at_wair.qp.gems.gov.bc.ca>...
>Using Webserver, how do I send an e-mail ?? I mean other than the
>'mailto' html tag.
>
>For example, on a registration screen, once completed I want to send an
>e-mail to the new user. Using forms, this could be done with OLE calls
>to the mail API. I have found several examples of how to do this.

You will need to write a CGI to do it. OLE is not part of the WWW standards (and don't even mention that Thing (tm) called Active-X! :-) ).

Quick explanation what a CGI (Common Gateway Interface) is. It's a program/script that's run by the Web Server. The web server creates several environmental variables containing the information about the current web browser connection. The most important of these is the QUERY_STRING variable which contains the parameters (such as e-mail address and text) which the web browser passed to the web server. After setting these variables, the web server executes the CGI program. This program then reads the environment parameters, do what it's suppose to do (like send e-mail, connecting to database, running a servive etc.), and returns a dynamically created HTML page as STDOUT (standard output). The web server reads STDOUT and passes this as is back to the web browser as the response.

CGI's can be written in everything from Unix scripts, Perl, C to Delphi (depending on the platform).

Here's a very simple Unix CGI script that returns the Unix environment variables:

--
#!/bin/sh
echo "Content-type: text/html"
echo ""
echo "<html>"
echo "<head></head>"
echo "<body>"
echo "<pre>"
env
echo "</pre>"
echo "</body>"
echo "</html>"
--

Copy this into your CGI bin directory and run it via your web browser.

regards,
Billy

Received on Tue Dec 09 1997 - 00:00:00 CST