ajt has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have in the past written my own form processors for email, and at times used MSA formmail.pl.

I know that formmail is quite old, and has it's faults. I did a very quick search and didn't come up with much except Exploit this formmail.pl for fun and, well, fun. (LONG), which seem to be somewhat critical of formmail.

Is there a more modern application available, and if so where is it?

Using CGI and one of the Net modules, plus a few basic modules it's easy to make a simple generic form processor and emailer, but I don't want to re-invent the wheel. However if it's an existing (safe and reliable) application, I don't want something that relies on Sendmail directly, as it must run on NT or Linux.

As ever thanks in advance.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Formmail or something else?
by davorg (Chancellor) on Sep 24, 2001 at 18:11 UTC

    There's always the new, improved FormMail, available from NMS.

    --
    <http://www.dave.org.uk>

    "The first rule of Perl club is you don't talk about Perl club."

[reply]
Re: Formmail or something else?
by footpad (Abbot) on Sep 24, 2001 at 18:26 UTC

    You might consider davorg's NMS, which contains a formmail replacement that's far superior to the original. It also contains some other nifty things.

    You can also roll your own version by combining CGI.pm and MIME::Lite, which is what I did for a certain project. I found it to be a particularly painless process.

    Finally, I recommend adding Writing CGI Applications with Perl and CGI Programming with Perl to your technical library (and, of course, reading them carefully). When combined, both books provide a very nice ground work for writing superior versions of everything on MSA.

    --f

[reply]
      Got hold of both NMS FormMail and STAMP. Will quickly evaluate them, and proceed from there. Many thanks to people for the quick suggestions.

      I have both editions of the Mouse book already. I know it's older, but I actually think I learned more from the first edition "CGI Programming on the World Wide Web".

      Looking an NMS FormMail, I see that it uses sendmail, which isn't an option for me on NT. I know I could use blat or something similar, but STAMP looks more useful as it talks directly to the SMTP server.

      Don't have the other book, will investigate it. Thanks for the comment.

[reply]

        On Windows, you can use Blat as a sendmail replacement.

        My preference is for using Mail::Mailer or Net::SMTP for sending email, but the rules for NMS were that the scripts should use no CPAN modules.

        --
        <http://www.dave.org.uk>

        "The first rule of Perl club is you don't talk about Perl club."

[reply]
Re: Formmail or something else?
by suaveant (Parson) on Sep 24, 2001 at 18:04 UTC
[reply]
Re: Formmail or something else?
by jerrygarciuh (Curate) on Sep 24, 2001 at 19:00 UTC
    IMHO cgiemail does a fine job of parsing form data and when coupled with a simple template will produce easy to read emails with all the vars labelled however they are most useful to you.
    HTH
    jg
[reply]

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