Sendmail CGI generates Apache error

[katir at hindu.org]

Alex, thanks! Two mangos with one stick... we actually haven't done anything yet to all the email addresses on the site... and there are others on the team here that think forms are a bad way to make people contact you... I myself don't see why exactly, since you can make the form look nearly identical to an email client new message window... and only if you start using the web page for other things, asking for more then the needful info just to let them email you... etc. how is it that different than having the browser kick up your email client?

but i guess people prefer the cozy world of their own email client when they click a link on a web page and that is  understandable, ends up in their sent mail, etc...

So, we'll investigate the coding link option.. yes, that would be a lot easier to implement in the long run. That's the first mango.

and "You *always* have to send a valid http header of some kind back to the browser, when writing a CGI." 

is the second mango. I didn't know that... I thought if the cgi invoked a process on the server, that was the end of it.

Best from Hawaii
Sivakatirswami


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Alex wrote:

You are doing it the hard way. There any lots of methods for obfuscating email addresses on web sites to hide from spam harvesters. There is no reason to force people to use form-mailers. I dislike those and I think a lot of other people do too. See

<http://www.wbwip.com/wbw/emailencoder.html>
<http://www.cdt.org/speech/spam/030319spamreport.shtml>

The following actually works, the mail is sent, but it is followed up immediately with an error msg from the server... any ideas? for some strange reason the error is not logged into the webmaster/error log... i suspect that's because in fact it works,  ie the email *is* sent.... does apache expect us to handle stdout?  But, there is none...?

You didn't show us the entire script?
What is the exact error message from the web server?

Most of the time 500 server error problems are because the script does not return a valid http header, or returns other content before the http header.

Immediately after startup, before doing any other work:

put "Content-type: text/html"