I am making a simple e-mail post form and I was hoping someone could tell me how to make the submit button automatically _link_ to a Thank You Page . Do I have to add something to the Form action=mailto... line? As others have mentioned, you can't do this with an email form. This is one of the many reasons I recommend CGI _script_s over email forms. The
mailto: protocol was developed to send mail, not to transmit form information. The Wilbur specification allows it to be used in this fashion, but there are many browsers which do not implement it in that way, notably Microsoft Internet Explorer, NCSA Mosaic, and earlier versions of Netscape Navigator. Those browsers, if they do anything, will bring up a blank email window for their users, discarding all the information they have entered into the form. Even for those people whose browsers do automatically insert form information into email, there are problems. For example, there's no interaction: when they submit the data, there's no indication that anything's happened. They have no way of telling whether they were successful or not. For these reasons, I would recommend not using
mailto: as an action for forms. CGI _script_s work much better to that purpose. CGI _script_ing is not difficult for those who have had any experience programming, and there are even archives of previously written _script_s that you can use with very minor changes. A good list of World Wide Web pages is at <URL:http://www.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/ World_Wide_Web/CGI___Common_Gateway_Interface/ and useful information can also be found in the newsgroup comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi If you can't use CGI _script_s on your site for whatever reason, there are even services which will allow you to use _script_s on their sites. The five I know of are: - Meng Weng Wong's mailto.cgi (which is complicated but flexible, and free), at <URL:http://icg.resnet.upenn.edu/mailto.html - Remote Software (which is actually several services, one of which is easy to use and free), at <URL:http://www.remote-software.com/products.html - CGI Free (which is also flexible, simple, and free, but doesn't let you specify the address for the From field), at <URL:http://cgi-free.com/ - the Electronic Stamps System (which costs money, but has a one-week free trial period), at <URL:http://www.cambridgeco.com/e-stamps/ - Mailform (which is also free, but which requires registration and which I have difficulty reaching), at <URL:http://www.coder.com/code/mailform/ (Thank you to Jukka Korpela for the notes!) Note that I am not affiliated with any of these services, and would love to hear of any additions to the list. Good luck! - Kivi
