at the Merrick School of Business

When you create a form and you do not have the ability to decode it using a CGI program written in perl, basic or C, you can use Form Mail-- a freeware cgi -- to mail the form to you with its fields decoded, using the MIS Server. This page explains how to do it. You should have an understanding of HTML and forms before trying it. This script will only work for forms and e-mail addresses in the UB domain. You will receive an error message if you do not use the UB servers and e-mail address. Access will be denied if you use it reading from a local file, or other server, for security reasons.

Create your form as any other form using the following instructions:

1. <FORM METHOD="POST" ACTION="http://mis.ubalt.edu/cgi-bin/FormMail.pl">
2. <INPUT type=hidden NAME="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF">, white background for error messages, you can use any color.
3. <INPUT TYPE=hidden NAME="subject" VALUE="your choice"> , where your choice value is what you want to receive as subject of the message with the form fields decoded. There should always be a subject.
4. <INPUT TYPE=hidden NAME="recipient" VALUE="first.last@ubalt.edu"> , where first.last@ubalt.edu is the e-mail address the message is to be sent to (your e-mail address at UB) -- there should also always be a receiver of emails sent from this form.
5. Please enter here your e-mail address: <INPUT TYPE="text" NAME="email" SIZE=40> -- there should always be a sender of the emails sent from this form - user supplied..
6. Enter all other fields you want in your form using regular HTML and field names of your choice.

7. Enter the fields that you require (mandatory for you) from the ones you specified above in the following command (add, do not delete the ones that are already in the value of the required field):
   <INPUT TYPE=hidden NAME="required" value="email,recipient,subject">
8. Enter here the URL of the page acknowledging to the user that the form information was sent--<INPUT TYPE=hidden name="redirect" value="http://home.ubalt.edu/ubxxxxx/formthanks.html"> . Of course, you can also use this item to redirect the user to another page, not only to send a thank you form.
9. You must now decide the order in which the fields will be listed on the e-mail. The default is the order they were defined (not requiring any command in the form).
   
   • if you want the fields to be sorted alphabetically enter the following:
     <input type=hidden name="sort" value="alphabetic">
     
   • if you want the fields in a given order use the following:
     <input type=hidden name="sort" value="order:name1,name2, ...,nameN">

10. <INPUT TYPE="submit" VALUE="Send Email"><INPUT TYPE="reset" VALUE="Clear"> -- the standard buttons to submit or clear the form.
11. </form>

All other fields in your form will be treated as part of the body of the message and decoded automatically. As a matter of courtesy to the author of the script please include the following at the bottom of your form page:

There is another complete example here. Please let me know if you have any problems using this procedure.

This page is maintained by Al Bento who can be reached at abento@ubalt.edu. Although we will attempt to keep this information accurate, we can not guarantee the accuracy of the information provided. This page was last updated on November 17, 2003.