How does CGI work?

I'm going to presume that when you want to leave the email contact you don't just want to leave the alumni's email address which would be a potential spam target, and that when you say form you mean email contact form sort of like the one in the middle of the Ask Dave A Question page.

First create the form in Frontpage or Dreamweaver or however you normally create your html documents. Now looking at the html code for the document the actual form part will look something like this:

What people often do is to write a program or script to tell the form what to do and save it separately on the server, this is called sever side scripting. There are several languages you can write this script in but most commonly used are Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) or the open source Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP).

In this example I'll use PHP.

If you look at the first line of the html form code <form action="email.php" method="post"> it's the action part which tells the form what its going to do.

In this case action="email.php" so what I need to do is to write a document telling the form what to do and call it "email.php".

Here's a very basic example of what to write in the "email.php" file:

To create this document you need to use a ASCII text editor such as Microsoft's Notepad. Once written go to Save As and where it says File name: write "email.php". Then be sure to change Save Type As: from Text Document (*.txt) to All files or it will save the document as a text file and not a PHP file.

You then need to upload both files to your website hosting server making sure the form part of the html document has the form action changed to action="email.php".

This method will only work if the server where you are hosting your website files has the ability to read sever side scripts and you may need to ask your website host if, and how they do this.

If you need to use a different language here's an example of a site which helps you create forms in various script languages: Tele-Pro.

The example I gave was quite basic as you may want to add extra features such as the page to redirect to once the form is submitted or a page to point out any errors in the submited form, but these would require additional pages. There are lots of examples out there if you 'Google' around a bit.

It's also important to be cognizant of security issues with web pages that can send email. Spammers have been known to find and exploit sites with email forms that are not setup properly to avoid email being sent to any addresses other than the intended one. For example, if you used a hidden field in your form with the "To:" email address, these hidden fields can actually be changed before the form is submitted back to you. The spammer could set up a script that would modify that field for each email sent, and send spam through your web server.

Hope this helps.