Simple Form Mail for PERL

The need for simple and easy to maintain forms on a website is critical. Everyone wants to collect information and have it delivered to their mailbox. But with all the bots and spammers, mail forms are the most attacked and comprimised. So we are posting a simple solution that uses our own CAPTCHA for perl to prevent automated submissions.

The other goal is to provide an easy to build HTML form that can be modified by any WYSIWYG editor such as frontpage or dreamweaver without any changes to the mail processor script. A script that is impervious to attack and will deliver all the form data in a manner that is useful.

The hardest part about using this script will be using the CAPTCHA. Otherwise, it is a simple one script solution that can process all the forms on your website. Just point the forms to post to the script and it will parse all the fields, sort them into alphabetical order and mail out the result.

To make this as easy as possible we have a fully configured zip file. Just unzip the file on your server and configure the formmail.cgi and you can start using it. It will be easy to build forms using your favorite webpage editor. The formmail.cgi will accept inputs from all the forms on your website.

download the complete tar.gz file - Includes the captcha image sets, formail.cgi, form.html, thankyou.html, temp directories and log files. This is everything you need. If you want to download the pices and create the directories and log files yourself, use the links below. Many of us have phobias about opening zip files so we try to provide all necessary files in plain text also. If you unzip this file in your server, everything should work as is without any configuration. Once it is working, you can make changes to the configuration.

formail.cgi - Text format of the formmail.cgi

form.html - The html page with the form fields to be posted to the cgi program. Presented in txt format so you can see the form fields and the page intact. If you access an html page with a browser and save it, each html page it will be modified differently by each browser. That is the reason for provideding a txt format of an html page.

thankyou.html - You should not really need this but it is part of the full package so we added it here. You can use any page or direct the program to an existing page or website.

captcha.cgi - The full CAPTCHA parts can be downloaded on the captcha page where you can also download additional image sets each containing 1000 captcha images each. Or download the full zip version of this package.

Configuring the scripts and form

Installing Mail Forms in PERL

Addons and modification ideas and tweaks