cgi-mailer - UniMelb Customisations

The CWIS group has customised version 1.9.6 of the cgi-mailer software by Martin Gleeson to better meet the university requirements.

Details of these customisations are as follows:

• Configuration of "From" address for form submission emails
• Default sending address
• Default required, data and response files
• Sending an email response to the form user

Configuration of "From" address for form submission emails

To facilitate the configuration of auto-responders to form submissions the "From" address of email submissions can be set in one of two ways:

1. Specify a field (of type text or hidden) with the name set to "header:From"
   

   ie. <input type="text" name="header:From">

2. Specify a field (of type text or hidden) with the name set to "From"
   

   ie. <input type="text" name="From">

Note:

1. The first option allows you to have a separate field in your form called "From" which will be processed as an ordinary form field, whilst allowing the email "From" address to be set using the "header:From" field.
2. If only the "From" field is used, the value $From will still be available for use in the cgi-mailer response email and page. If only the "header:From" field is used, no "$From" field will be available for the cgi-mailer response email and page.

Default sending address

If a "From" address is not specified a default email address of "cgi-mailer submission <http@myriad.its.unimelb.edu.au>" will be used.

Note: If an email is sent to this address (ie. a web site maintainer responds or auto-responds to an email from cgi-mailer) it is configured to send a warning email back to notify the sender that they have emailed a system account.

Default required, data and response files

For cases in which you have multiple forms with the same input fields (eg. two pages asking for the name and email address of interested parties) it is possible to set up default files which will be used by all forms.

The default files and html pages with similar forms should all be in the same directory on the web server, the default file names are as follows:

If you are using long filenames (with the full .html extension) cgi-mailer will look for:

• cgi-mailer-required.default
• cgi-mailer-data.default
• cgi-mailer-response.default

If you are using 8+3 filenames (with the .htm extension) cgi-mailer will look for:

• cmail-req.def
• cmail-dat.def
• cmail-res.def

The format of the required, data and response files is exacly the same as the standard required, data and response files.

When processing your form, cgi-mailer will check first for the form specific file (ie. for myform.html, cgi-mailer will look for myform.data, myform.required and myform.response) and if it cannot find it it will then check for the existence of a default file in the same directory as the form.

Sending an email response to the form user

If you want the user of a form to receive the email response as well as the 'destination' recipients a 'mailtouser' field can be used, ie:

The value of the "mailtouser" field specifies the name of the field that will receive the user's email address.

Note:

• If there are any non-standard characters in the email address it will be discarded for security reasons.
• If the user enters a typo in their email they will not receive the email response.

Created:       23 November 2001
Last Modified: 24 July 2002
Authorised by: Director, Information Technology Services.