[SOLVED] Form to email on web pages - Zimbra tie in available?

[nadsab]

Hi,

I’m fairly new to Zimbra, installed ZCI open source last year on my server and it runs great I love it! I mainly do web design for a living, pretty good at site layout but still fairly green at programming.

I have a question, I am building some new email “contact us ”forms for some of my web sites, and I was looking for either a stand alone or Dreamweaver “form to email” plug in php script generator, which would generate the necessary php to process and send emails from web site to site owners email address’s.

I just realized, that before I do that, I should check with you guys first – does either Zimbra offer, or are there any third party Zimbra plug ins available that have any kind of solution for this?

Either a web based email form that I can put on my sites and have them plug in directly to Zimbra? Or a script generator which would generate the necessary code to link my email and or feedback forms into Zimbra?

Thanks for any info.

[uxbod]

Welcome to the forums

Why not just send it to the user@domain.com ? The MX record will then direct to your ZCS installation.

[nadsab]

Hi there thanks for the reply!

So to understand this, are you saying that all I would need to do is create my forms in Dreamweaver, and instead of having to use any php (or perl, etc) for scripts to connect to sendmail or the php mail functions and process the email, etc, all I need to do is set only the email address of the reciepient Zimbra user in the form itself and that's it?

[uxbod]

Yep, if the webserver has the capability to send a email then all should be good. If not, then you could code something in PHP to relay through your ZCS server.

[nadsab]

OK great thanks uxbod, I'll try it out with my forms and see how it works out for me.

Just curious, I'd also like to add CAPTCHA to my mail forms. Do you have any recommendations for captcha scripts? I notice that the Zimbra site uses it, what does Zimbra use, or is it proprietary code?

[uxbod]

A quick web search produced :- PHP Captcha Security

[nadsab]

OK thanks.

Quick question, for sending it to Zimbra, is all I need to do, is set the
the action within my form tag to: method="post" action="user@domain.com" ?

[uxbod]

No, you should pass the details to a routine which will initiate a email to be sent. PHP Tutorial: Writing Your First PHP Script: A Feedback Form (a FormMail Script) (thesitewizard.com)

[Unix Anand]

Hello,

I have installed Zimbra Open source on RHEL5.2. This is a fantastic mail server no doubt about it anybody can install it and use it. Now my main purpose of zimbra mail server is use as a internal mail server, in our office approximate 75 users are using Outlook for Send/Receive mails. Our mail server is hosted at One of ISP. I have configure DNS in Linux and zimbra mail server with same name of company name which is hosted at ISP with same name, for example (anand.in at ISP and anand.in at our office means internal mail server). Now my problem is our 25 users are using Laptops and they are mostly travels for business. They are using data card for send/receive their mails, I have created dummy accounts in internal mail server, If I send the mail their accounts the mails are going is internal mail server i.e. In dummy accounts not in hosted mail accounts. In the Zimbra mail server Our MTA setting is “Web mail MTA Hostname = Internal mail server IP Addess” and
“ Relay MTA for external delivery = ISP Server IP Address ”.
Kindly suggest How to resolve this issue. Appreciate your help.

Thanking you,

Anand Mane.

[nadsab]

Thanks much uxbod,

I'm working on the script with your suggestions. Actually I bought a couple of php books too to start learning.

I've also been doing some on line research on this the past couple of days and after learning a bit, I'm concerned about spamming, attacks, etc. So after what I've read, I'm think for now I should use a pre made and secure script while I learn php and then maybe some time in the future I'll write my own when I feel Confident. What do you think about pre made form mail scripts?

I was looking at PHPMailer-FE from Codeworx Technologies Their site claims it is a secure and regularly updated script - is this accurate?

Apparently in 2007 there was a security vulnerability in the script and they went a long time without patching it…

Another point - I bought the book – “The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS4 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP” by Powers and in it the author claims that if you want to accept html mail, use this script, but he does not recommend using PHPMailer-FE because when browsers are configured to not accept html mail there should also be a text alternative anyway. Would PHPMailer-FE be a security risk because it accepts html mail and file uploads?

Powers goes through a tutorial on how to create a PHP form mail script for text only and includes the code snippets and claims it is a secure script.

What do you think would be better? Use his code from his book? Or use PHPMailer-FE? Or would you recommend a different script than that, which accepts only non html mail?

I was also looking at the forms-to-go code generator Form to Email scripts easy with Forms To Go which is a drag and drop application which you can drop your form into and it creates your php – does that application write secure code, or am I better off staying away from script generators and going with a well written secure script?

I don't really care about file and photo uploads right now, as long as I can get a basic email via the web form that’s all I need for now...