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

Three questions, Sorry!

1) I have set up a form so that people can submit there email addresses to my mailing list.
Ok I have been messing around with an autoreply and need to be able to send an "HTML" file with the autoreply thru sendmail. This way you get a GREAT email message instead of yucky text-on-text

Does anyone know how to do this?

2)Does anyone have a snippet of code that will check a existing .txt file for the email address entered and return "already added" to the user if they already added there email address? I cant seem to get one right.

3)Anyone know why The cookie i set below for +1y seems to not be there after i close my browser? Is it the way im reading it? I cant seem to use HTTP::cookie so i use $q->cookie().

heres a sample:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

use CGI;
$q = new CGI;

$thefile = "email.txt";

$my_email = "webmaster\@itsmeagain.com";


$email_entered = $q->param('email');

#check for email valid
$FORM = $q->param('email') . ",";

if ($q->param('email')) {
        unless ($FORM =~ /\w+@\w+.\w+/) {
          print $q->header(-type=>'text/html', accept=>'*/*');
        print $q->start_html(-title=>'Bad Email');
        #print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
                print "<html><head><title>Bad E-mail</title></head>\n"
+;
                print "<body><h1>Bad E-mail</h1><br>The e-mail address
+ that you've\n";
                print "entered,<b><font color='red' size='+3'> $FORM</
+font></b> is invalid.  Please click back and\n";
                print "try again.\n";
        print $q->end_html;
    exit;
        }

#chk for cookie 
$JSCRIPT=<<END;
function go(){
if (document.referer){
window.parent.location=document.referer;
}
else{
document.location= "http://www.mysite.com/index2.htm";
}
}
setTimeout("go()", 5000);
END
$chkcookie = $q->cookie( "email" );
if ($chkcookie eq $email_entered){
print $q->header(-type=>'text/html', accept=>'*/*');
print $q->start_html(-title=>'Already Entered This Email', script=>$JS
+CRIPT);
print "<h1><b>You just entered this email address! </h1>---<font size=
++1></b>Click back to continue or wait and I'll send you!";
print $q->end_html;
}
else
{
&filewritee;
}
}
else
{
print $q->header(-type=>'text/html', accept=>'*/*');
print $q->start_html(-title=>'Nothing Entered');
print "<h1>Nothing Entered.</h1><br><br>\n";
print "You didn't enter anything, Pls go back and enter a valid email 
+address";
print $q->end_html;
}

sub filewritee{

open (EMAILADDRESS, ">> $thefile") or
    die "Can't open file: $!";
flock EMAILADDRESS, 2;
print EMAILADDRESS $FORM;
close EMAILADDRESS;
&sendmail;
}

sub sendmail{

open (MAIL, "| /usr/vde/bin/sendmail  -t")
        or die "couldnt open sendmail: $!";

print MAIL <<EO;
To: $email_entered
From: $my_email
Subject: Weekly mail from me
EO
open (FILE, "< weekly.htm")
 or die  "Cannot open file: $!";
while (<FILE>) {
print MAIL;
}
close FILE;



close (MAIL);

&successs;
}

sub successs{
$JSCRIPTT=<<ENDD;
document.cookie = "email=$email_entered", expires="+1y";
ENDD

print $q->header(-type=>'text/html', accept=>'*/*');
print $q->start_html(-title=>'-Email Added Successfully!', -script=>$J
+SCRIPTT);
print "<h1><font color='#000080'>SUCCESS!</h1><br><br>\n";
print <<ENDOF;
<p><b>Your Email address: </font><font color='red' size='+2'> \"$email
+_entered\" </font><font color='#000080'>was added successfully!<br></
+b> You should be getting your first mail shortly!</p>
ENDOF
print $q->end_html;
exit;
}

[download]

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: CGI, cookies, sendmail, HTML attachments, searching txt files,
by projekt21 (Friar) on Oct 26, 2001 at 13:17 UTC

    A couple of questions... I'll try to give some comments on the first one:

    That HTML mail might look pretty but I would like to encourage you to send plain ascii, but that is just my humble optinion.

    Maybe you you want to have a look at MIME::Entity and use it to create a RFC compatible email containing both, a text/plain MIME part and a text/html part for those mail clients that support it. MIME::Entity has a well understandable documentation showing you how you create a mail and finally give it to sendmail.

    If you prefer doing that all by yourself, do not forget to set a correct Content-Type in your mail header (look at the headers of some HTML mails you got).

    Hope this helps a bit.

    alex pleiner <alex@zeitform.de>
    zeitform Internet Dienste

[reply]
Re: CGI, cookies, sendmail, HTML attachments, searching txt files,
by projekt21 (Friar) on Oct 26, 2001 at 13:20 UTC

    For question No. 3:

    I use something like that to read and write cookies:

    use CGI;
my $q = new CGI;

# read cookie
my %cookies = $q->cookie(-name => "test_foo");
my $bar = $cookies{bar};
my $foo  = $cookies{foo};

# write cookie
my $cookie = $q->cookie(-name    => "test_foo",
                        -value   => {
                                     foo  => "foo",
                                     bar  => "bar",
                                    },
                        -expires => '+10m');

print $q->header(-cookie=>$cookie, -expires => "now");

    [download]

    alex pleiner <alex@zeitform.de>
    zeitform Internet Dienste

[reply]
[d/l]
Re: CGI, cookies, sendmail, HTML attachments, searching txt files,
by projekt21 (Friar) on Oct 26, 2001 at 13:26 UTC

    Question 2 (code not tested):

    sub checkemail {
  my $email = shift;
  open IN, "/some/textfile.txt" or die "errormessage";
  while (<IN>) {
    chomp;
    return "already added" if $email eq $_;
    # if textfile.txt has one email address per line
    # and nothing else
  }
  close IN;
  return;
}

    [download]

    Update (thanks to Hofmator for showing the obvious): dropped that error

    This can be improved, but it should work. Hope it helps.

    alex pleiner <alex@zeitform.de>
    zeitform Internet Dienste

[reply]
[d/l]
      return "already added" if $email eq chomp($_);

      This has to be replaced by 

      chomp;
return "already added" if $email eq $_;

      [download]
      as chomp returns the number of characters chomped. Common mistake ;-)

      -- Hofmator

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