[eMailman]
[E-Mail]
[Finger]
[Search]
[Add/Fix URL]
[Credits/Statistics]
About eMailman(tm) web form mailer
What Is eMailman(tm)
eMailman(tm) is a system for handling forms/e-mail for a variety of users with a variety of forms.
Why not use a simple mailto: URL
- Privacy -- your e-mail address is not given out
- Avoid unsolicited commercial e-mail -- your e-mail address is not available to devices that scan web sites for e-mail addresses
- Collect all the data you want -- if you ask people to include various information with a regular e-mail link, they will forget to include a lot of it. By using a form, you can list each particular detail you want as they are writing the message.
Why not use a mailto: form
- Privacy -- with a mailto: form, your e-mail address is still in the underlying HTML
- Avoid unsolicited commercial e-mail -- with a mailto: form, your e-mail address can still be picked up by automated devices
- With a mailto: form, at least with Netscape, there is no "acknowledgment" page after one clicks the send button. When I used a mailto: form, sometimes I would get the same message 2 or 3 times in a row because the sender wasn't sure their message had been sent.
- With a mailto: form, the data comes into your e-mail needing some decoding, and perhaps as an attached file (depending on what browser the sender used). No need to with eMailman(tm); the message arrives as normal text.
- With a mailto: form, if you wish to have multiple users and multiple forms, you need to do separate HTML for each variation. Ensuring consistency across a web site can thus be difficult.
- eMailman(tm) not only has an acknowledgment screen repeating the message sent, but also delivers a confirmation to the sender via e-mail.
Other Features
- eMailman(tm) lets you set up a group mailing easily, such that e-mail/forms sent to that user actually get mailed to multiple e-mail addresses.
- eMailman(tm) lets you set up a group such that e-mail/forms sent to that group get delivered to one member of the group at random. For example, if your organization has 5 people who handle e-mail for technical support or other contact from the public, you can distribute the load evenly among many people.
More Information
- eMailman(tm) is a cgi script written in Perl
- After installing eMailman(tm) in one area on your server, multiple users can use multiple forms. Yet each call to eMailman(tm) will have basically the same URL. Just the variables passed to that URL differ; one variable for which user, one for which form (unless using the default form).
- To add a new user to eMailman(tm), one just needs to enter into the text file for user info the user's name, e-mail address, and any customized HTML one wants to appear when eMailman(tm) is called with their name.
- To add new forms to eMailman(tm), one just needs to enter the form HTML into a text file containing the multiple forms. For organizational purposes, one can have more than one text file including forms.
[ATStarr's WWW Site]
[E-Mail]
[Finger]
[Search]
[Add/Fix URL]
[Credits/Statistics]
eMailman(tm) is a trademark of Andrew Starr