Caudium: Using the MailIt Module

By Joe Follansbee, joef@follansbeeconsulting.com

Nearly every Web site includes a page that invites users to send e-mail to the Web site owner. More and more of these pages use a Web form for e-mail communication. This tutorial explains how to use the MailIt module with the Caudium Web server to add simple form-based email capability to a Web site.

Requirements

I’ve attempted to write this tutorial for a new Caudium user with little or no experience using RXML, the markup language used by Caudium. However, a basic knowledge of HTML and programming logic is helpful. You will need:

Caudium 1.0.34
MailIt 1.8 (or later)

Installing Caudium

If you have not already installed Caudium, please see Bill Welliver’s Caudium Installation Tutorial.

Installing MailIt

Download the MailIt module from the Roxen Module Source Web site, http://source.riverweb.com/ and place it in a convenient directory. Log in as root, cd to the directory where you downloaded the MailIt tarball, and run these commands:

gzip –d mailit-1.8.tar.gz tar xvf mailit-1.8.tar cd mailit-1.8

At this point, it’s a good idea to review the README file for important information. Also, check out the examples in the “/examples/” subdirectory. Then copy the mailit.pike module to your Caudium server tags directory.

cp mailit.pike /usr/local/caudium/server/modules/tags/

Modify the directory location to suit your Caudium installation, if different from the defaults.

Adding MailIt to Your Caudium Virtual Server

This part of the tutorial assumes you have a working Caudium installation and have created a virtual server. To add the MailIt module:

Log in to the Caudium Administration Interface
Click the Virtual Servers tab
Click the name of the virtual server of the Web site that will use MailIt
Click the Add Module link at the bottom of the virtual server page showing the installed modules
Look for the MailIt module (You may need to reload the page once or twice.)
Click the MailIt link
Click the Save link at the bottom of the virtual server page showing the installed modules

That’s it! MailIt is now installed.

MailIt Configuration

Most users will be able to use MailIt without any further configuration. However, it’s a good idea to check its configuration anyway. Click the MailIt module link, and note the options, in particular the location of the Sendmail binary. (Sendmail is the most popular e-mail system on UnixUnix®® and *nix clone systems and installed by default on almost all installations. You can use MailIt without knowing anything about Sendmail. If your operating system places sendmail somewhere other than MailIt's default, you should make sure that you provide the correct location.)

Using MailIt

For the purposes of this tutorial, we’ll build a simple set of three Web pages.

form.html
send.html
redirect.html

Only send.html will contain MailIt tags.

form.html

Create an HTML page with a form for entering an email address, a subject, and the message. Here’s some sample form code. Note the ACTION attribute.

<FORM ACTION="send.html" METHOD="post"> To: <INPUT TYPE="text" NAME="to"><BR> From: <INPUT TYPE="text" NAME="from"><BR> Subject: <INPUT TYPE="text" NAME="subject"><BR> Message: <TEXTAREA NAME="message" ROWS=”5” COLS=”50” WRAP="true"></TEXTAREA><BR> <INPUT TYPE="submit" NAME="send" VALUE="Send"><BR> </FORM>

To see how the form looks, click here .

send.html

This is where the action is, literally! send.html contains the MailIt tags, which are interpreted by Caudium to send the e-mail written in form.html. Here’s all the code for send.html. If you copy and paste this into your code, be sure to remove the comments in parentheses!

<HTML> <HEAD><TITLE>MailIt Tutorial Send Script</TITLE></HEAD> <BODY> This is a sample send script for the MailIt tutorial.<BR><BR>

(This RXML container tells Caudium to insert the form values into the script.)
<formoutput>

(The opening of the MailIt container.)
<mailit>

(This tells MailIt who sent the mail and who gets the email. They're the values of the TEXT HTML tag with the names (keys) "to" and "from". Note carefully the "#" character on either side of "to" and “from”. Without these, the formoutput container won't insert the form values, and MailIt won't know where to address the mail "to" and “from”.)
<mailheader name="to" value="#to#"> <mailheader name="from" value="#from#">

(This inserts the Subject value of the key/value pair from the TEXT HTML tag named "Subject". The "quote=dtag" part takes care of problems that might be caused by odd characters in the subject. Note again the use of the "#" character on either side of the inserted value.)
<mailheader subject="#subject:quote=dtag#">

(This is the opening tag of the actual message container, and it's where the body of the email message goes.)
<mailmessage encoding="7bit">#message#

(The closing tag for the message.)
</mailmessage>

(The closing tag for MailIt.)
</mailit>

(The closing tag for the <formoutput> RXML container.)
</formoutput>

(This tells Caudium to redirect the sender to another page. This avoids a second email sent due to an accidental reload of send.html.)
<header name="Location" value="redirect.html"> <return code=302> </FORM> </BODY> </HTML>

redirect.html

redirect.html is a plain HTML page with a message saying the email was successful. As mentioned above, we use this to avoid a second email due to an accidental reload of send.html.

You’ve now completed the Using the MailIt Module for Simple Form-Based Email tutorial!

For More Information

Caudium Home Page: http://caudium.net
Module Archive (includes MailIt): http://source.riverweb.com

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