HOW TO: Set Up FrontPage 98 Forms for E-Mail

Microsoft FrontPage 98 supports sending form results in e-mail. To accomplish this, you must configure your form to send results to e-mail and configure the FrontPage Server Extensions to deliver the e-mail to an e- mail transport. This article describes how to set up FrontPage 98 forms for e-mail.

Define Your Form

To define your form, follow these steps:

1. In FrontPage Editor, right-click the form (inside the dash border) and then click Form Properties on the menu that appears.
2. In the E-mail Address box, type your e-mail address.
3. Click OK.
4. Save the form by clicking Save on the File menu.

Set Up Your E-mail Transport

To send form results to an e-mail host, the FrontPage Server Extensions require a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server. The FrontPage 98 Server Extensions do not support any other form of e-mail server software. Microsoft Exchange Server 5.0 and above supports SMTP when IMS services are started.

To send e-mail from the Web server, configure the FrontPage Server Extensions in the Frontpg.ini file on the server to deliver the mail to an e-mail transport. To do this, follow these steps:

1. On the Windows Start menu, point to Programs, point to Accessories, and then click Notepad.
2. On the File menu, click Open.
3. Select the Frontpg.ini file and then click Open.
   
   This file is typically located in the \Windows or \Winnt folder.
4. To configure your e-mail transport, locate the [FrontPage 3.0] section and then enter the parameter you want. When you do this, use the following syntax.
   
   NOTE: For a list of the supported parameters, please see the "Parameters" section of this article.
   
   Syntax for Windows NT Server:
   Parameter=value
   Syntax for UNIX is:
   Parameter:value
   This should be set in the Wexxxx.cnf configuration file where x stands for the TCP/IP port on which the Web server is running, for example:
   /usr/local/frontpage
5. Save and close the file.
6. Stop and then restart the Web server.

If your web is hosted on your Web Presence provider's server, you must contact the server administrator and have them follow the steps previously listed.

Parameters

FrontPage 98 supports five parameters (configurations) for e-mail transport:

• SMTPHost
  
  This parameter should be set to the name or IP address of a host running an SMTP server or daemon, such as SendMail on UNIX. When a user submits a form with results that are to be sent via e-mail, the FrontPage Server Extensions connect to the SMTP server to deliver the mail. By default, FrontPage assumes the server is listening to port 25 (the standard for SMTP) but you can override this by appending the port number to the name. The name and port number are separated by a colon, like this
  name:xx
  where xx represents the port number.
  
  The following are examples of a parameter=value setting:
  SMTPHost=mail.example.microsoft.com
  SMTPHost=127.0.0.1
  The following is an example of a parameter:value setting:
  SMTPHost:test:1000
• SendMailCommand
  
  This parameter should be set to the name of a program on the server computer to which e-mail should be piped. Typically, this is SendMail on UNIX, but it could be any program. When the FrontPage Server Extensions receive a form processed as an e-mail message, the Server Extensions invoke the command, replacing all occurrences of "%r" with the recipient of the mail. The per cent sign character followed by any other character is replaced by the recipient's e-mail address. The mail message is passed to the command as standard input. If both SendMailCommand and SMTPHost are set, SendMailCommand takes priority.
  
  Following is an example of the SendMailCommand parameter:
  SendMailCommand:/usr/lib/sendmail %r
  NOTE: Sometimes it may be necessary to add the MailSend parameter. Some mail servers have filters that block mail by an unknown account, that is, the account is not a valid email account on the server.
• MailSender
  
  This parameter should be set to the sender's user name. Specifically, it is used as the argument for the "SEND FROM:" command in SMTP. The default for SMTP is user@host, where "user" is the current user account and "host" is the current host name.
• MailCharSet
  
  This parameter can be used to override the character set attribute of the content-type header.
• MailEncoding
  
  This parameter can be used to override the content transfer encoding attribute of the content-type header.

Possible Error Messages

If the SMTP host is present when the form is created, but the SMTP host is later removed (and the form has not changed since then), you receive the following error on a default page returned by the form when the form is submitted: If SMTPHost is not present when the form is created, you receive the following error message from FrontPage: NOTE: This error message is received if e-mail is not configured when the form is created.

If you choose not to remove the e-mail recipient and the extensions are not configured correctly, then when the form is filled out and submitted, the form is refreshed, but a background image (if previously present) does not appear, and the Address line in your browser is changed from this to this or, if hosted on NT Server, it changes to this: This error occurs anytime that you have a configuration issue with any of the dynamic run-time components in FrontPage.

If the form is configured to save results to a file, or to send e-mail simultaneously, and the FrontPage Server Extensions are not configured to handle e-mail, a 0-byte file is created. It does not contain any data, you do not see an error message, and the mail is not sent.

For additional information about sending form results to multiple files or people, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
For more information about the FrontPage Server Extensions, see the FrontPage 98 Server Extensions Resource Kit (SERK), located in the \Serk folder on your FrontPage 98 compact disc.