Mailform Extra allows you to specify two different resposes to a form submission which in these notes will be labelled the acceptance response and rejection response. You can specify what tests are to be made on the entered form field values and the results of these tests determine the response, that is whether the form submission is accepted or rejected. Part of the acceptance response can be the sending of one or more emails, which can contain the information entered into the form. The format of each email is specified by you.
| opening an account | checking form input | response web page | emails | templates | inserting form field values | html code for form | testing |
For the time being no new accounts can be opened. This does not effect existing users in their use of Mailform Extra and the maintenance of their account.
/^\d+$/ would require the value to
contain only digits (the characters 0 to 9).
Forward slash must be used as the regular expression delimiter.
You need not specify any list of tests. In which case a rejection response is ruled out and except for the possibility of an error condition there can only be an acceptance response. For possible error conditions see the Testing section If you ask the form submitter for their email address, then it would normally be advisable to apply the email address test to this field. You should always test it if it is going in the from or to address of an email.
The advantage of using a template is that the contents of the page can be modified by including form field values in the page and in the case of the rejection response page by including and excluding blocks of code.
The web page generated by a template will reside on a Thalasson web site because it will have the same web address as your personalised mailform script address; that is, it will contain your account name or account id. But since it does not actually reside on your site you must ensure that all the links it contains are full addresses not relative addresses.
Using a redirect has the advantage that the response page can be truly one on your own web site. Also, by using form field value insertion on the redirect address, rather than having just the two pages, the acceptance and rejection pages, as possible response pages, you can have an indefinitely large number of different response pages.
Web page redirection is the mechanism used by the standard Thalasson mailform service and redirection should be transparent to nearly all form submitters.
If you do not specify any emails then none will be sent in any case. There are conceivable uses of the system where this would be the desirable option.
You determine the content and format of the emails. This means that each email must have an associated template.
You must supply a from and to address for each email. These can be created from form field values where this is required. The from address will normally be set in a Reply-To email header line and not in the From header. Where the email is being sent to you, you can have a dummy address as the from address but it must be formatted to look like a genuine email address.
An email template consists of the email message (the email body) with insertion points marking where each value is to be inserted. It is important to remember, especially in regard to email templates, that a form field value will not appear in the email if you do not provide an insertion point for it.
An email template can be specified as being an HTML template in which case the email will normally be displayed like a web page on being viewed by the recipient.
A web page template consists of the complete HTML code for the web page (plus JavaScript, CSS etc where you wish to use this). As in the case of email templates, you must add insertion points where values are to be inserted. The contents of a web page template will alway be treated as containing the complete HTML code that makes up the web page even if you have defined the template as containing plain text.
You can have a set of form field values each with the same name (usually from check boxes in the form). In this case a composite value is constructed consisting of the values strung together with a separator character placed between each individual value. You can specify a separator for each template.
For both emails and web pages, as well as form field values, you have
available for insertion the 'environment' variables as passed to the
mailform script.
The most useful one is HTTP_REFERER (note spelling). This will
normally give you the address of the web page containing the form.
When you open an account some templates will be created for you. You should use these templates but replace or modify the preset template contents in accordance with your individual requirements. The preset contents correspond, more or less, to the templates presented in the example account. Templates that you are not using you can delete. You can create new templates later if you require them.
You are advised to keep and maintain a copy of each of your templates on your own computer and copy and paste them into the appropriate account configuration form when you create or update the template.
You should try to prevent the total sum of your template sizes going beyond 100 KB.
An insertion point consists of the field (or environment variable's) name placed between a left and right delimiter. For each template you can define a sequence of one to four characters for each kind of delimiter. When the value is inserted into the copy of the template the name and the surrounding delimiters are completely replaced by the value.
Form field values (and environment variables) can also be inserted into email from and to addresses, into email subject headers and into redirect web addresses. In these cases you have no choice in setting the left and right delimiter values. They are square brackets ( [..] ) for from and to addresses and curly brackets ( {..} ) in the other cases.
Insertions into email addresses allow you to do things like specifying an
address as [email] where email could be the field
holding the form submitter's address.
There is a special facility in regard to the rejection response web page where you can exclude blocks of code that are not relevant because any tests made on a particular form field were successful. The way this facility works is best shown by an example:
Suppose we ask the form submitter for their email address and have a field named email to hold this address. If curly brackets are the left and right delimiters we can have the following in the template:
<{email}>Please enter your email address</{email}>If the test on the address in email succeeds then all this code is removed. If it fails (ie there is not a valid address in the form field) then the code above is replaced with:
Please enter your email address
Note that the pseudo HTML tags have been removed but not the message between them.
In using this facility note that the normal rule of the delimited field name being replaced by the field value is overridden.
The accountcode determines your account. It can be your account id or account name. Spaces in the account name should be replaced by points (.) or underscores (_). In this context the account name is case insensitive.<FORM METHOD="POST" ACTION="http://qkxyq.com/thalasson/mailform.cgi/accountcode">
Similar to the standard Thalasson mailform service, the form must have
METHOD=POST and the ENCTYPE value can be left out
or, if present, must be the default which is
application/x-www-form-urlencoded.
Also, as with the standard service, TYPE=FILE form fields
are not supported.
Unlike the standard service, there are no form field names with any predetermined special functions since any such functions are set up by you when configuring your account.
There is no specific limit to the size or complexity of your form although some limit may be applied to the overall size of the form data sent to the mailform script. (This is currently 32 Kb.)
There are two main problems to look out for:
(1) You have not got a valid from or to address in one or more of the emails. In which case no emails will be sent and you will not see your expected response page. Instead in the page that is returned you will see the message:
Mailform Extra - internal configuration problem
(2) You have specified a redirect to a response page but the redirect address (after possible field value insertion) does not have the right format for a web address. In this case there will be an acceptance or rejection response as appropriate but in either case the web page will not be one you have specified and it will contain the heading:
Mailform Extra - the Thalasson mailform handling service
In all other cases you should get the acceptance or rejection response as specified by you.
| opening an account | checking form input | response web page | emails | templates | inserting form field values | html code for form | testing |
From there on the charge is 15 UK pounds for a year (or 9 pounds for 6 months or 2 pounds for one month).
Payment is via WorldPay who accept all major credit cards. As well as the UK pound price, WorldPay will show the current US dollar price and the price in Euros. For other currencies the price paid will depend on your card provider's currency conversion rate.
If you like the system and wish to use it beyond the free trial period then you should pay by the end of this period. If you have not paid by the end of the free trial then the account will normally remain fully operational for a few days more, with a late payment being accepted, (but you cannot extend the free trial period by paying late - or reduce it by paying early).
The payment status page in your account configuration pages will show you the end date of your free trial period and this page also has the link to Worldpay's secure payment site.
You are advised not to pay before you have configured your account to your satisfaction and made a successful test form submission.
You incur no obligation to pay if you stop using the service before the end of your free trial period.
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| opening an account | checking form input | response web page | emails | templates | inserting form field values | html code for form | testing |