CGI emailer that doesn't interrupt browsing

Hello,

	I am shopping for a simple CGI. I found one, and tried to modify it
slightly, and ran into this problem...

	I want a small form to send its contents to the CGI. I want the CGI to
email that information to me. Meanwhile, the form should use JavaScript
to send the user to the next page. My problem is that even this simple
CGI is trying to output a sucess page to the user. When I commented-out
the lines responsible for the success page, an error-message page ("500
Configuration error" or somesuch) appeared. Ugh!

	Previously, we'd used a Perl script that emailed the form results to
us and then sent the user to the success page. The problem with that
was when our ISP began having some sort of slow-down problems, the Perl
script began behaving sporadically, and some users were blocked from
accessing the success page. I'm not concerned, at the moment, with
fixing the ISP problem; I'm concerned with removing the user's
dependence on our CGI working.

	I want the user to be able to access the destination page whether the
CGI succeeds or not. If the CGI fails, we won't get the information,
but that's okay.

	All that said, here's my problem. I am playing with James Marshall's
mailer.pl (http://www.jmarshall.com/easy/cgi), which is so
well-commented that I can understand what it does (I don't actually
program Perl). I commented out the part that writes the success page,
and while the script continues to email the results to me, the browser
displays an error message.
	Now I read in builder.com's Intro to CGI programming
(http://www.builder.com/Programming/CGI/ss04a.html) that the CGI
**must** return something to the browser! Is that true? To quote, they
say,

"Whenever a user invokes a program, the browser keeps the connection
open, waiting for some kind of response. All of your CGI scripts need
to send something back to the browser."

URk!  Is it true that my modified mailer.pl must return something to
the browser? If so, how can I make it something other than an HTML
page? I did succeed in outputting a JavaScript file meant to display an
Alert, but :-) that resulted in the browser downloading an actual
JavaScript file! Cool, IMO, but not what I wanted. I want the form to
send the user to the desired page, whether or not the Perl script
works, and I don't want the Perl script to further interrupt that
progress.

Many thanks for your help! This is eating up far too much time.
complex

=====
Michael Greisman
Webmaster
Scanalytics, Inc.

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