Example 3: Process e-mail generated by a Web form into a database

The use of Web forms to collect information on visitors has become very popular. Although you could set-up your Web server to process the information into a database directly, it is often more practical and certainly more economical to have the information collected sent to you as an e-mail. This is very easy to set-up on your web server, and Emailrobot is able to intercept those e-mails and process them into a database of your choice as they are received. To set-up this system, you will need to do the following:

Step 1: Install a form handling script on your Web server. For more information on this script and how to install it, check the EmailrobotError! Reference source not found. website FAQ.

Step 2: Create a form on your website that collects all the information you need from your web-visitor. For each part of information that you collect, you will need to make a separate field name. Make note of this field name. If you are not sure how to create a form, check the appendix of this manual on how to create a Web form using Frontpage Express or Frontpage. A sample form, 'wwwform.htm', is included in the Emailrobot\Samples directory.

Step 3: You need to set-up a mailbox or an e-mail address or a unique subject line by which Emailrobot can identify which Web form has generated the e-mail. In many cases you might have multiple Web forms, and for each Web form you probably have different information that needs to be stored in a separate way. If you are using a separate mailbox you will need to add it to the list of mailboxes that are checked periodically.

Step 4: Create a database with all the fields that you have used in the Web form, so that Emailrobot can insert the Web form fields into the database. As an example you can use wwwform.mdb, located in the samples directory.

More:

Creating the script


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