Formmail and its many variants, is a free open source

web server A web server is computer software and underlying Computer hardware, hardware that accepts requests via Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, co ...

CGI script that captures and processes

form Form is the shape, visual appearance, or configuration of an object. In a wider sense, the form is the way something happens. Form may also refer to: *Form (document), a document (printed or electronic) with spaces in which to write or enter dat ...

contents and then typically e-mails them to one or more recipients. The script, originally created in

Perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

, was originally written in early 1993 by Reuven M. Lerner, as part of his work on The Tech, and was included in the archive of CGI programs made available by

NCSA HTTPd NCSA HTTPd is a discontinued web server originally developed at the NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign by Robert McCool and others. First released in 1993, it was among the earliest web servers developed, following Tim Bern ...

. In its original form, it was called "form-mail.pl", and was released under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

. The program was subsequently stripped of its copyright and authorship, renamed "FormMail", and publicized by Matt Wright as part of

Matt's Script Archive Matt's Script Archive is a collection of CGI scripts written in the Perl programming language. Started in 1995 by Matt Wright (at the time a high school student in Fort Collins, Colorado), the archive contains about a dozen free scripts, design ...

Operation

The script operates by iteratively reading all the form fields from the submitted form via the form ACTION tag. Next the script begins to build an e-mail message from the submitted fields, typically concatenating the name and value of each submitted form field in the body of the email message. The script uses several specially-named hidden fields to control the operation of the script. The various hidden fields control who the recipient of the e-mail is, what the email subject is set to, etc. Finally the script e-mails the form's contents to the recipient(s). The typical FormMail script has this common functionality: * Reads all form fields and creates an e-mail message from them * Recipient fields (typically hidden) allow creator to determine e-mail recipient * Subject field, allows the creator to set the Subject of the e-mail in a hidden form field * Required fields, allows you to set which fields need to be completed to send the e-mail * CC, BCC fields, allow you to copy and forward to multiple recipients More advanced variants of the script have additional features such as: provide for e-mail attachments, prevent form spamming, save the e-mail to a file or database, add

CAPTCHA Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) ( ) is a type of challenge–response authentication, challenge–response turing test used in computing to determine whether the user is human in order to de ...

validation and more. Today a variant of the script exists for most popular web

scripting language In computing, a script is a relatively short and simple set of instructions that typically automation, automate an otherwise manual process. The act of writing a script is called scripting. A scripting language or script language is a programming ...

s, such as Perl, ASP (ASP.NET),

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by the PHP Group. ...

, ColdFusion, and

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

References

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Operation

See also

References

External links