Using e-mail to send a web form message

email

My problem is that sometimes I want to send an important notice to a company. I use normal, not electronic, mail – "recorded delivery". The problem is, that I only get evidence of sending the mail, and no confirmation about what was in the envelope – that's why I also send an e-mail, saving it in sent folder. Unfortunately some companies don't have e-mails (or they don't publish e-mail addresses), only web forms.

If I understand it well, web forms work like this: user fills up input fields and clicks "send" button, browser makes a GET or POST request to server URL given in form's "action" attribute, and the PHP file at this URL is sending the message to SMTP server. Can't get the e-mail address from the source, can't even get the SMTP server address.

I guess that makes it impossible to use Gmail to send e-mail through web form.

But maybe there are other solutions to keep evidence of forms being sent?

Best Answer

If you're only looking to keep an electronic record of when you submitted a form, you can do something like this:

  • Get a piece of software that lets you print to PDF. Basically, this is just a print driver that you "print" to as if it were a printer, but the output is a PDF file to your hard drive. There are quite a few of these; PDFCreator is onesuch, but if you look around a bit you should be able to find one you like.
  • When you submit a form, you should get a confirmation page. Use the print function of your browser to print to PDF. The headers and footers of the printout should contain the URL as well as the time and date.

Not all confirmation pages echo back the information you submitted (for security reasons) so you might also want to print the form prior to submitting it.

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