How can users send me email through their browsers?

There are two ways:
Using a mailto: URL
You can simply create a link which looks like this:

<A HREF="mailto:me@my.address">Send Me Mail</A>

This works great for browsers that support the mailto: URL. Perhaps 80% of web users will be able to use such a link. But not all browsers support it.

Installing an email form
If you have access to the server's configuration files, or if your server administrator permits users to create their own CGI scripts, you can create a form which sends mail to you from any browser that supports forms. A really flexible package for this is the mit-dcns-cgi package (URL is <URL:http://web.mit.edu/wwwdev/www/dist/mit-dcns-cgi.html> ). I've written a simple email forms package (URL is <URL:http://siva.cshl.org/email/index.html> ), which does it in ANSI C. There is also a package written in Perl, known as the WWW Mailto Gateway (URL is <URL:http://www.mps.ohio-state.edu/mailto/mailto_info.html> ). GetComments (URL is <URL:http://everest.cs.ucdavis.edu/~hoagland/getcomments.html>) is a more general package, also written in Perl, which can do many different things in response to a form submission.

If you want to learn how these forms actually work, see the entry on CGI scripts.


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