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Using /cgi-bin/mail on www.fsu.edu - web forms

Departmental World Wide Web page developers on www.fsu.edu may access a CGI program that decodes form input and eMails it to a prespecified alias. Departments can request creation of an eMail alias that points to one or more eMail addresses to receive the data. The program is called "mail", and was written by Carlos A. Pero at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

Sorry, this service is not available for student organizations at this time.

First Step:

To request access to the program, send eMail to problems(at)ucs.fsu.edu requesting to be added to the "mail" database with the following information:

  1. The departmental webaccount name
  2. Who the eMail generated by the form should go to (can be more than one person, if desired)
  3. The preferred name of the alias

UCS will generate an alias for you, placing it in a database that is accessed by the "mail" program. You will receive an eMail from us containing the assigned alias and confirming that the service is ready to use. If you have multiple forms you may request multiple aliases, as needed.

Using "mail" in your form:

The action URL in the departmental form should be

<FORM METHOD="POST" ACTION="http://www.fsu.edu/cgi-bin/mail?alias">

where "alias" is the alias you received from UCS.

Customizing your auto-acknowledgement (optional):

If you wish, you may customize the acknowledgement a user receives in response to filling our your departmental form. Include the following in your document:

<INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="next-url" VALUE="/~user/received.html">

where "~user" is your departmental webaccount name and "received.html" is the name you assign to the acknowledgement file. If this is present in the FORM input, the browser will be redirected to the file you specify as a confirmation message instead of the default.

Customizing eMail generated by the form (optional):

In addition, you can also define any of the following input names in your form to further customize output eMailed back to the alias.

<INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="subject" VALUE="My survey results">

<INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="from-name" VALUE="Average Web user">

<INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="from-email" VALUE="jdoe@domain.com">

These values will then be used in the header of the eMail message. Otherwise, default values will be substituted.

Be sure to make appropriate substitutions for VALUE.