Form action=mailto problem

by D J Wessels <djwessels(at)yahoo.com>
Date:	Thu, 21 Dec 2000 07:18:56 -0800 (PST)
To:	hwg-techniques(at)hwg.org
	todo: View Thread, Original
Hi, all! I have run upon an error (bug? feature?) that
I had not previously encountered and wanted to see if
anyone here had any experience resolving this.

I am building online forms for my client's intranet,
and they want the form results sent via email to the
perrson who will handle them. As I always do, I built
a one-item test form to make sure that the form would
be submitted correctly, go where we expected, arrive
intact with no data corruption, yada, yada. My main
concern lay in the fact that the client is running an
odd amalgamation of Novell and NT servers, and uses
GroupWise 5.2 for their email services. Novell and NT
are not known to work and play well together, so I've
been doing an inordinate amount of testing throughout
this project.

Here's what happened: I put the form in place (see
code below) on the intranet server (an NT box) and
submitted a test. Instead of sending the form data in
the body of a new email message to the email address
listed, it opened a blank email message on the client
machine, with the email address listed in the To:
field. No form data, no nothing.

I have never had a problem with this code, in better
than five years of development work.

I checked the Microsoft KB and found an article on How
To Specify Mail Settings in the Microsoft Management
Console (Q201526). I followed those instructions, but
it did not change the form behavior.

I opened this issue with Microsoft about six weeks
ago, and all they can tell me is that this
functionality is not discussed in RFC 2368 (which
deals with messaging) so it can't be done. That does
nothing to explain why I have been able to do this in
the past, why most HTML tutorials I have seen state
that this is the way to do it, and more importantly,
it does nothing to tell me *how to fix it*.

I wouldn't be all that concerned, except I don't want
to find in six months that this was a symptom of a
much larger problem.

Any insight you may have would be appreciated.

Here is my "form page":
***************************************
<html>
<head>
<title>Form</title>
</head>
<body>
<form method="post" action="mailto:me(at)company.com" 
enctype="text/plain">
<p>Name: <input type=text name=FirstName size=30></p>
<p><input type=submit></p>
</form>
</body>
</html>
***************************************

Thanks again for your assistance.

Dottie 

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