Form instructions for NAS.com

The first thing you have to do when you start using a new hosting service and you want to use email forms is to find out what system they support. You can usually find instructions in the support area of the hosting center. These (slightly re-written) are what I found at NAS.com - they use a service called Mail Response. Full instructions are here.

Mail Response Notes from nas.com administrators:

To set up a mail response form, you will create an HTML document containing your form and three or more other files. The files are:

1. A file that describes where the other files are and the email address to send the form to (the configuration file)
2. A file that describes what the mail message should look like (the mail template file)
3. An HTML file that is returned to the browser after sending the mail (the reply template file)
4. Optional files that are returned to the browser if the user filled out the form incorrectly (error template files) (see validation instructions)

The Configuration File

Example File (right click and "save as") 

This file is referred to directly in the action statement of your <form> tag and it points to the other two files.
e.g:

<form ... action="/cgi-bin/form-mail/~webclass/yourfolder/form.txt" >

In this example above the configuration file is called "form.txt".

Format of config file

(the filenames must be in the same directory as the configuration file)

Recipient youremailaddress
MailTemplate filename
ReplyTemplate filename 

The Mail Template File

Example file (right click at "save as")

This template formats the email you get when the user presses submit.

By entering $fieldname with the name attributes of each of your <input> tags from your form you can get the results back in readable form. Note that the first two lines and the following blank line are required - these format the email itself. The lines after the blank line are filled in the body of the email and constitute the response to your form. Please check the fieldname carefully or you will not get the answers back! Note that radio buttons (see $sex below) will be set with the value from the form (in this case "male" or "female") whereas for checkboxes (see $movie1 etc) will be displayed as "on" or "off".

Subject: Submission from $fullname
Reply-To: $email
(note blank line here! denotes start of body)

Email address: $email
Sex: $sex
Age: $age
Name: $fullname
Legend: $movie1
Compass: $movie2
Bucket: $movie3
Horse: $movie4
Sweeney: $movie5
Remote Addr: $REMOTE_ADDR

The Reply Template

This is just a regular html file. Apparently server side includes cannot be accommodated here, although external css files are.

You can create a page from your site template and then modify it with parameters that can be filled in by the program. For instance, if you asked the person to supply their name, you could put their name in the page dynamically to personalize it such as "Thank you, Susan, for participating in our survey". Use $ followed by the fieldname you used in the form itself, for example:

<p><strong>Thank you, $fullname !</strong></p>

Which, when filled out by Daffy Duck, shows up as:

Thank you, Daffy Duck !

I suggest you include a link back to your site as your navigation will probably not be displayed.

Instructions for using FormMail

All you need to setup formmail, is to create your form inside a regular html web page. The form tag should be structured as below, and you will need a submit button (shown) as well. In between those two are all the checkboxes or radio buttons or text fields that your form is comprised of. Note that in the example below I'm leaving out the surrounding html for the page:

  <form name="test" 
      action="/cgi-bin/form-mail/~webclass/yourfolder/form.txt" 
      method="post">
                ....YOUR VISIBLE FORM ELEMENTS HERE.....
    <input type="submit"> 
  </form>

62z