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lexus

lexus

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Mar 26, 2006
1,569
0
Depends Greatly On The Weather
Where can i find a secure form where people need only put there email address in and a compilation would be made from which i can send an email to all people who submitted their email address. Something like PHP list but alot simpler.

Thank you
 
K

Kunimodi

macrumors member
Sep 8, 2006
65
0
Ashland, OR, USA
lexus said:
Where can i find a secure form where people need only put there email address in and a compilation would be made from which i can send an email to all people who submitted their email address. Something like PHP list but alot simpler.

Thank you
Click to expand...

Hi, lexus. This depends on what services your host supports. Here are two easy ways that you can do this without relying on a external service:

1. Put a form in the page that uses a get request so that the HTTP logs will show the e-mail:
Code: 
<form action="nextstep.html">            
   <input type="text" name="myemail" />       
   <input type="submit" />            
</form>
Then you'll see something in the access logs along the lines of:
[IP] - - [DATE] "GET /nextstep.html?myemail=me%40example.com HTTP/1.1" 404 215
Though crude, this has the advantage of working on a server that does not allow server generated pages (e.g. PHP, ASP, cgi, etc).

2. Bite the bullet and use a PHP or other server side script. Here is a very, very simple one-liner to do it:
Code: 
<?php file_put_contents('emails.txt', $_GET['myemail'], FILE_APPEND); ?>
You can use the form in step 1 and put the one-liner in nextstep.php (and change the form's 'nextstep.html' to 'nextstep.php'). This will append each e-mail to 'emails.txt'. For security, you can move 'emails.txt' to a directory protected with .htaccess, etc.
 
lexus

lexus

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Mar 26, 2006
1,569
0
Depends Greatly On The Weather
Kunimodi said:
Hi, lexus. This depends on what services your host supports. Here are two easy ways that you can do this without relying on a external service:

1. Put a form in the page that uses a get request so that the HTTP logs will show the e-mail:
Code: 
<form action="nextstep.html">            
   <input type="text" name="myemail" />       
   <input type="submit" />            
</form>
Then you'll see something in the access logs along the lines of:
[IP] - - [DATE] "GET /nextstep.html?myemail=me%40example.com HTTP/1.1" 404 215
Though crude, this has the advantage of working on a server that does not allow server generated pages (e.g. PHP, ASP, cgi, etc).

2. Bite the bullet and use a PHP or other server side script. Here is a very, very simple one-liner to do it:
Code: 
<?php file_put_contents('emails.txt', $_GET['myemail'], FILE_APPEND); ?>
You can use the form in step 1 and put the one-liner in nextstep.php (and change the form's 'nextstep.html' to 'nextstep.php'). This will append each e-mail to 'emails.txt'. For security, you can move 'emails.txt' to a directory protected with .htaccess, etc.
Click to expand...

Thank you very much, could you explain how to do this using PHP a bit better, I am a total noob at this.

Thanks
 
K

Kunimodi

macrumors member
Sep 8, 2006
65
0
Ashland, OR, USA
lexus said:
Thank you very much, could you explain how to do this using PHP a bit better, I am a total noob at this.

Thanks
Click to expand...

Normally, PHP files are text files with a .php extension that the server has been set up to treat a little differently from regular .html, etc files. They are just like an HTML file except that anywhere in the HTML you can add a PHP block by putting inside of <?php ... ?>. The '...' is where you would put the PHP code. When a browesr requests that file, the server will replace all the PHP blocks with anything they output and send the result to the browser. For example,
Code: 
<html>
  <body>
    <?php print('hello'); ?>
  </body>
</html>
will return a page that looks like this:
Code: 
<html>
  <body>
    hello
  </body>
</html>
The neat part about this is being able to do dynamic stuff like
Code: 
<html>
  <body>
    <?php print(15 + 15); ?>
  </body>
</html>
which produces
Code: 
<html>
  <body>
    30
  </body>
</html>
When a user enters information into an html form the values they entered are automatically available to php with the special arrays _GET and _POST, which match the name in the originating form element. So if the entry page is this:
Code: 
<html>
  <body>
    <form action="process.php" method="get">
      <input name="myemail" type="text" />
      <input type="submit" />
    </form>
  </body>
</html>
and process.php is:
Code: 
<html>
  <body>
    Your email is <?php print($_GET['myemail']); ?>
  </body>
</html>
the page will show 'Your email is example@example.net' if a person entered 'example@example.net' into the entry page. We use this system to write to an email text file instead, doing it at the beginning of the processing:
Code: 
<?php file_put_contents('secure/emails.txt', $_GET['myemail'] + "\n", FILE_APPEND); ?>
<html>
  <body>Thank you for adding your e-mail.</body>
</html>
This would append the value of 'myemail' (and an end of line character) to the 'emails.txt' file in the folder named 'secure'.
 
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