Through your web site you will usually want to have not only a one-way presentation but also an automatic email-dialog with your visitors. How can you create such a connection between your web site and your visitors' email? And what can you achieve by it?

By your web site usually you don't want only present yourself, your products or services. (Well, there are also some web sites that seem to be good only for the ego of the owner.) Normally you will want to incite your visitors to take any action. And you will want to get a message of it. Or you will need to know some details in order to respond appropriately. Anyway, all that should be handled automatically.

Apparently, there is only one way to get that information: your web site has to send an  email  to your account. For checking your email you can set up  filters  so that your email software categorizes all your incoming emails automatically, all the  feedback  emails from your web site being stowed away in a special mailbox. Or, even better, you can set up your  autoresponder  such that it handles all the feedback-emails automatically.

There are basically two ways how you can make your web site send an email:

1. Direct Email

Frequently you will want your visitors to enter a certain information, click a button, and receive any value in return. This value could be, say, getting access to restricted part of your web site. Or it could be any download.

If your visitors are not so net-savvy, they will not even get aware having sent an email to you when they've clicked the submit-button.

You can implement that by having a form on your web site whose contents is prompting the visitor for all the information you want to have before the action in return:

  	<FORM METHOD="post" ACTION=...../formmail.pl>
		:
		: (form contents)
		:
	<input type="submit" ...>
	</form>

 FormMail  is a CGI-script that you will have available through your web site host, if it's a good one. Otherwise you can download it for free from:

However, you will still need to inform your ISP once you uploaded FormMail. That's necessary because your ISP's system administrator has to integrate the CGI-script into the operating system of the web server (e.g. by a command "chmod", if it's a UNIX-server). You don't have the access rights to do that.

For details refer to FormMail's documentation that will come along with its CGI-code when you download it.

2. Indirect Email

You can get emails by your visitors also without taking so much effort. The email will be prepared according to your code, the visitor just needs to send it explicitly. A slight drawback of this method might be that the visitor is aware of an email and can modify or even suppress it. Therefore, if you want to have unlimited control over your visitors' emails, you will better use a direct email.

All you need to do is providing a link in the HTML-code of your web site:

<A HREF="mailto:name@yourdomain.com">

You can have the email prepared with a certain subject text by adding  ?subject=xxx  ("xxx" being the text you want to have written in the subject line).

So, the following is the complete code of a link by which your visitor can have an email prepared:

<A HREF="mailto:name@yourdomain.com?subject=xxx">

That's useful if you want to have control over the exact wording of your visitors' emails. So you can equip your own email software by some filters by which incoming emails are assigned to different mail boxes. As well, you can set up your autoresponder to take different actions depending on the presence of some keywords in the subject line of your visitors' emails.

Similarly, you can have a certain body text written in your visitors' emails. To get it, simply add  ?body=yyy  ("yyy" being the text you want to have written in the body).

So the complete code looks like this:

<A HREF="mailto:name@yourdomain.com?body=yyy">

You can even combine both:

<A HREF="mailto:name@yourdomain.com?subject=xxx?body=yyy">

If part of your body text ("yyy") is a link, it is automatically converted by most modern email software. You can use that, for example, if you want to offer your visitors a link by which they can email their friends  inviting  them to visit your site:

<A HREF="mailto:name@yourdomain.com?subject=Visit ... web site!
?body=Great downloads, at: http://www.yourdomain.com/">

So the friend who is invited to visit your web site just has to click the link in your visitor's email to arrive automatically at your web site.

If needed, you can also include addresses for "cc:" and "bcc:", like in the following code sample:

<A HREF="mailto:name@yourdomain.com?cc=name@domain1.com?bcc=name@domain2.com
?subject=Visit ... web site!
?body=Great downloads, at: http://www.yourdomain.com/">