Sending an email message from within MetaCard

[Sadhunathan Nadesan]

| 
| Has anyone implemented a system like this?  Is there a better way?  Can
| anyone point me to a model I could follow?
| 

Hi,

Yes, we've implemented some things like this.  Either custom cgi's or
using the FormMail.pl script from Matt's perl archives.

In other words, the problem is - trying to send emails directly off a
personal computer of some kind means you have to deal with too many
variations of how these machines are set up to use email.  A
nightmare.

So instead, you use a 'post' command to send off your data to a
webserver somewhere running a cgi like FormMail which in turn sends
the email for you.

If you have an ISP and they let you put cgi scripts in your home
directory (generally ~/public_html/cgi-bin or something like that) you
can use FormMail or your own variety of script.  (It can be an MC
script if you have the Metacard engine installed on the web server for
example; I sent a post last year of how to do this.)

Lately I have wanted to do this with the mail being in turn an html
mail with a form on it with a submit button.  At work we developed a
perl script (mimemail.pl) for sending html mail that does a lot of the
work of composing the right headers, and what my MC cgi's do is create
the html file to be used as the attachment and then system off a
command line to mimemail.pl.

Make sense?

Sadhu