- Mojofied FormMail
- COPYRIGHT
- LICENSE
- URL
- SUMMARY
- FILES
- CONFIGURATION
- INSTALLATION
- FORM CONFIGURATION
- COMMON PROBLEMS
- SUPPORT

# Mojofied FormMail

This is a tweaked version of Dave Cross's FormMail.pl script, as well as doing all of it's FormMail goodness, it can also subscribe an email to a Mojo Mail list. Instructions to install this script are below and you should follow them. You should first install Mojo Mail and have the running correctly, before tackling this script.

In your html form, you need to also do a few things to clue Mojo Mail what mailing list you want to work with:

- list
  You need an HTML form field named 'list' that holds the list's shortname. This is the list that any email entered will be subscribed to.

  example:

              <input type='hidden' name='list' value='justin'>

- email
  You also need an HTML form field called 'email' this is the address that will get subscribed to the list you set in the list form widget. The email will only be subscribed if no subscription problems occur, like if the email is already subscribed, the list doesn't exists, the email address is blacklisted to this particular list, things like that.

  example:

              <input type='text' name='email'>

- add_email
  You finally need to make a field called ``add_email'' The email address will only be added to the list if this value is set to either 1 or ``yes''. This way, you can give the user a choice,:

       <input type="checkbox" name="add_email" value="1" /> Yes! Add my email to your list!

  If you don't want to give your visitor a choice, just make this a hidden field:

       <input type="hidden" name="add_email" value="1" />

Because this script has been tweaked to use the Mojo Mail libraries, you may need to tell the script where those libraries are. If you install FormMail in your cgi-bin directory, a directory immediately below you cgi-bin directory or in the cgi-bin/mojo directory, you should be alright. If not, you need to change the use lib ... line at the top of this script. The easiest thing to do is give an absolute path to both the mojo and MOJO directories:

            use lib qw(
            /home/account/cgi-bin/mojo
            /home/account/cgi-bin/mojo/MOJO
            );

    lastly, the '-T' flag has been removed from this script, as the Mojo Mail
    libraries probably won't run correctly with them on.

back to your regularly scheduled documentation...

# No __END__ here because that breaks under Apache::Registry

# COPYRIGHT

FormMail $Revision: 2.17 $ Copyright 2001 London Perl Mongers, All rights reserved

# LICENSE

This script is free software; you are free to redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

# URL

The most up to date version of this script is available from the nms script archive at <http://nms-cgi.sourceforge.net/>

# SUMMARY

formmail is a script which allows you to receive the results of an HTML form submission via an email message.

# FILES

In this distribution, you will find the following files:

FormMail.pl
  The main Perl script

README
  This documentation. Instructions on how to install and use formmail

EXAMPLES
  Some worked examples of ways to set up formmail

ChangeLog
  The change history of these files

MANIFEST
  List of files

# CONFIGURATION

There are a number of variables that you can change in FormMail.pl which alter the way that the program works.

$DEBUGGING
  This should be set to 1 whilst you are installing and testing the script. Once the script is live you should change it to 0. When set to 1, errors will be output to the browser. This is a security risk and should not be used when the script is live.

$emulate_matts_code
  When this variable is set to a true value (e.g. 1) formmail will work in exactly the same way as its counterpart at Matt's Script Archive. If it is set to a false value (e.g. 0) then more advanced features are switched on. We do not recommend changing this variable to 1, as the resulting drop in security may leave your formmail open to use as a SPAM relay.

$secure
  When this variable is set to a true value (e.g. 1) many additional security features are turned on. We do not recommend changing this variable to 0, as the resulting drop in security may leave your formmail open to use as a SPAM relay.

$allow_empty_ref
  Some web proxies and office firewalls may strip certain headers from the HTTP request that is sent by a browser. Among these is the HTTP_REFERER that the program uses as an additional check of the requests validity - this will cause the program to fail with a 'bad referer' message even though the configuration seems fine. In these cases setting this variable to 1 will stop the program from complaining about requests where no referer header was sent while leaving the rest of the security features intact.

$max_recipients
  The maximum number of e-mail addresses that any single form should be allowed to send copies of the e-mail to. If none of your forms send e-mail to more than one recipient, then we recommend that you improve the security of FormMail by reducing this value to 1. Setting this variable to 0 removes all limits on the number of recipients of each e-mail.

$mailprog
  The system command that the script should invoke to send an outgoing email. This should be the full path to a program that will read a message from STDIN and determine the list of message recipients from the message headers. Any switches that the program requires should be provided here. Your hosting provider or system administrator should be able to tell you what to set this variable to.

  A $mailprog setting that works for many UNIX-like hosts is:

        $mailprog = '/usr/lib/sendmail -oi -t';

  Some other UNIX-like hosts need:

        $mailprog = '/usr/sbin/sendmail -oi -t';

  For hosts that lack a suitable sendmail binary (such as most Windows systems) we have a Perl script which does the job of the sendmail binary, in the nms_sendmail package at <http://nms-cgi.sourceforge.net/>. See the README file in the nms_sendmail package for instructions.

@referers
  A list of referring hosts. This should be a list of the names or IP addresses of all the systems that will host HTML forms that refer to this formmail script. Only these hosts will be allowed to use the formmail script. This is needed to prevent others from hijacking your formmail script for their own use by linking to it from their own HTML forms.

@allow_mail_to
  A list of the email addresses that formmail can send email to. The elements of this list can be either simple email addresses (like 'you@your.domain') or domain names (like 'your.domain'). If it's a domain name then *any* address at the domain will be allowed.

  Example: to allow mail to be sent to 'you@your.domain' or any address at the host 'mail.your.domain', you would set:

  `@allow_mail_to = qw(you@your.domain mail.your.domain);`

@recipients
  A list of Perl regular expression patterns that determine who the script will allow mail to be sent to in addition to those set in @allow_mail_to. This is present only for compatibility with the original formmail script. We strongly advise against having anything in @recipients as it's easy to make a mistake with the regular expression syntax and turn your formmail into an open SPAM relay.

  There is an implicit $ at the end of the regular expression, but you need to include the ^ if you want it anchored at the start. Note also that since '.' is a regular expression metacharacter, you'll need to escape it before using it in domain names.

  If that last paragraph makes no sense to you then please don't put anything in @recipients, stick to using the less error prone @allow_mail_to.

%recipient_alias
  A hash for predefining a list of recipients in the script, and then choosing between them using the recipient form field, while keeping all the email addresses out of the HTML so that they don't get collected by address harvesters and sent junk email.

  For example, suppose you have three forms on your site, and you want each to submit to a different email address and you want to keep the addresses hidden. You might set up `%recipient_alias` like this:

        %recipient_alias = (
                             '1' => 'one@your.domain',
                             '2' => 'two@your.domain',
                             '3' => 'three@your.domain',
                           );

  In the HTML form that should submit to the recipient 'two@your.domain', you would then set the recipient with:

        <input type="hidden" name="recipient" value="2" />

$locale
  This determines the language that is used in the date - by default this is blank and the language will probably be english. The following a list of some possible values, however it should be stressed that not all of these will be supported on all systems and also this is not a complete list:

              Catalan           ca_ES
              Croatian          hr_HR
              Czech             cs_CZ
              Danish            da_DK
              Dutc              nl_NL
              Estonian          et_EE
              Finnish           fi_FI
              French            fr_FR
              Galician          gl_ES
              German            de_DE
              Greek             el_GR
              Hebrew            he_IL
              Hungarian         hu_HU
              Icelandic         is_IS
              Italian           it_IT
              Japanese          ja_JP
              Korean            ko_KR
              Lithuanian        lt_LT
              Norwegian         no_NO
              Polish            pl_PL
              Portuguese        pt_PT
              Romanian          ro_RO
              Russian           ru_RU
              Slovak            sk_SK
              Slovenian         sl_SI
              Spanish           es_ES
              Swedish           sv_SE
              Thai              th_TH
              Turkish           tr_TR

$charset
  The character set to use for output documents.

@valid_ENV
  A list of all the environment variables that you want to be able to include in the email. See env_report below.

$date_fmt
  The format that the date will be displayed in. This is a string that contains a number of different 'tags'. Each tag consists of a % character followed by a letter. Each tag represents one way of displaying a particular part of the date or time. Here are some common tags:

       %Y - four digit year (2002)
       %y - two digit year (02)
       %m - month of the year (01 to 12)
       %b - short month name (Jan to Dec)
       %B - long month name (January to December)
       %d - day of the month (01 to 31)
       %a - short day name (Sun to Sat)
       %A - long day name (Sunday to Saturday)
       %H - hour in 24 hour clock (00 to 23)
       %I - hour in 12 hour clock (01 to 12)
       %p - AM or PM
       %M - minutes (00 to 59)
       %S - seconds (00 to 59)
       %Z - the name of the local timezone

$style
  This is the URL of a CSS stylesheet which will be used for script generated messages. This should probably be the same as the one that you use for all the other pages. This should be a local absolute URI fragment. Set $style to '0' or the empty string if you do not want to use style sheets.

$send_confirmation_mail
  If this flag is set to 1 then an additional email will be sent to the person who submitted the form.

  CAUTION: with this feature turned on it's possible for someone to put someone else's email address in the form and submit it 5000 times, causing this script to send a flood of email to a third party. This third party is likely to blame you for the email flood attack.

$confirmation_text
  The header and body of the confirmation email sent to the person who submits the form, if the $send_confirmation_mail flag is set. We use a Perl 'here document' to allow us to configure it as a single block of text in the script. In the example below, everything between the lines

        $confirmation_text = <<'END_OF_CONFIRMATION';

  and

        END_OF_CONFIRMATION

  is treated as part of the email. Everything before the first blank line is taken as part of the email header, and everything after the first blank line is the body of the email.

          $confirmation_text = <<'END_OF_CONFIRMATION';
        From: you@your.com
        Subject: form submission

        Thankyou for your form submission.

        END_OF_CONFIRMATION

# INSTALLATION

Formmail is installed simply by copying the file FormMail.pl into your cgi-bin directory. If you don't know where your cgi-bin directory is, then please ask your system administrator.

You may need to rename FormMail.pl to FormMail.cgi. Again, your system administrator will know if this is the case.

You will probably need to turn on execute permissions to the file. You can do this by running the command ``chmod +x FormMail.pl'' from your command line. If you don't have command line access to your web server then there will probably be an equivalent function in your file transfer program.

To make use of it, you need to write an HTML form that refers to the FormMail script. Here's an example which will send mail to the address 'feedback@your.domain' when someone submits the form:

      <form method="post" action="http://your.domain/cgi-bin/FormMail.pl";>
        <input type="hidden" name="recipient" value="feedback@your.domain" />
        <input type="text" name="feedback" /><br />
        Please enter your comments<br />
        <input type="submit" />
      </form>

# FORM CONFIGURATION

See how the hidden 'recipient' input in the example above told formmail who to send the mail to? This is how almost all of formmail's configuration works. Here's the full list of things you can set with hidden form inputs:

recipient
  The email address to which the form submission should be sent. If you would like it copied to more than one recipient then you can separate multiple email addresses with commas, for example:

       <input type="hidden" name="recipient"
              value="you@your.domain,me@your.domain" />

  If you leave the 'recipient' field out of the form, formmail will send to the first address listed in the @allow_mail_to configuration variable (see above). This allows you to avoid putting your email address in the form, which might be desirable if you're concerned about address harvesters collecting it and sending you SPAM. This feature is disabled if the emulate_matts_code configuration variable is set to 0.

subject
  The subject line for the email. For example:

       <input type="hidden" name="subject"
              value="From the feedback form" />

redirect
  If this value is present it should be a URL, and the user will be redirected there after a successful form submission. For example:

       <input type="hidden" name="redirect"
              value="http://www.your.domain/foo.html"; />

  If you don't specify a redirect URL then instead of redirecting formmail will generate a success page telling the user that their submission was successful.

bgcolor
  The background color for the success page.

background
  The URL of the background image for the success page.

text_color
  The text color for the success page.

link_color
  The link color for the success page.

vlink_color
  The vlink color for the success page.

alink_color
  The alink color for the success page.

title
  The title for the success page.

return_link_url
  The target URL for a link at the end of the success page. This is normally used to provide a link from the success page back to your main page or back to the page with the form on. For example:

       <input type="hidden" name="return_link_url"
              value="/home.html" />

return_link_title
  The label for the return link. For example:

       <input type="hidden" name="return_link_title"
              value="Back to my home page" />

sort
  This sets the order in which the submitted form inputs will appear in the email and on the success page. It can be the string 'alphabetic' for alphabetic order, or the string ``order:'' followed by a comma separated list of the input names, for example:

       <input type="hidden" name="sort"
              value="order:name,email,age,comments">

print_config
  This is mainly used for debugging, and if set it causes formmail to include a dump of the specified configuration settings in the email.

  For example:

       <input type="hidden" name="print_config"
              value="title,sort">

  ... will include whatever values you set for title' and 'sort' (if any) in the email.

required
  This is a list of fields that the user must fill in before they submit the form. If they leave any of these fields blank then they will be sent back to the form to try again. For example:

       <input type="hidden" name="required"
              value="name,comments">

missing_fields_redirect
  If this is set, it must be a URL, and the user will be redirected there if any of the fields listed in 'required' are left blank. Use this if you want finer control over the the error that the user sees if they miss out a field.

env_report
  This is a list of the CGI environment variables that should be included in the email. This is useful for recording things like the IP address of the user in the email. Any environment variables that you want to use in 'env_report' in any of your forms will need to be in the valid_ENV configuration variable described above.

print_blank_fields
  If this is set then fields that the user left blank will be included in the email. Normally, blank fields are suppressed to save space.

As well as all these hidden inputs, there are a couple of non-hidden inputs which get special treatment:

email
  If one of the things you're asking the user to fill in is their email address and you call that input 'email', formmail will use it as the address part of the sender's email address in the email.

realname
  If one of the things you're asking the user to fill in is their full name and you call that input 'realname', formmail will use it as the name part of the sender's email address in the email.

# COMMON PROBLEMS

confusion over the qw operator
  In the configuration section at the top of FormMail, we set the default list of allowed referers with this line of code:

         @referers = qw(dave.org.uk 209.207.222.64 localhost);

  This use of the `qw()` operator is one way to write lists of strings in Perl. Another way is like this:

         @referers = ('dave.org.uk','209.207.222.64','localhost');

  We prefer the first version because it allows use to leave out the quote character, but the second version is perfectly valid and works exactly the same as the `qw()` version. You should use whichever version you feel most comfortable with. Neither is better or worse than the other.

  What you must not do is try to mix the two, and end up with something like:

         @referers = qw('dave.org.uk','209.207.222.64','localhost');

  This will not work, and you will see unexpected behavior. In the case of `@referers`, the script will always display a ``bad referer'' error page.

sendmail switches removed
  In the configuration section at the top of FormMail, we set the default mail program to sendmail with this code:

         $mailprog          = '/usr/lib/sendmail -oi -t';

  This is actually two different pieces of information; the location of the sendmail binary (/usr/lib/sendmail) and the command line switches that must be passed to it in order for it to read the list of message recipients from the message header (`-oi -t`).

  If your hosting provider or system administrator tells you that sendmail is /usr/sbin/sendmail on your system, then you must change the `$mailprog` line to:

         $mailprog          = '/usr/sbin/sendmail -oi -t';

  and not:

         $mailprog          = '/usr/sbin/sendmail';

# SUPPORT

For support of this script please email:

nms-cgi-support@lists.sourceforge.net