[10280] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: HTML questions ?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (jna)
Mon Sep 9 04:02:16 1996
Date: Mon, 9 Sep 1996 03:55:51 +0500 (GMT+0500)
From: jna <jna@retina.net>
To: Eugene Venter <VENTERE@telkom.co.za>
Cc: www-talk@www0.cern.ch
In-Reply-To: <s233da1a.009@telkom32.telkom.co.za>
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
On Mon, 9 Sep 1996, Eugene Venter wrote:
> There seems to be a lack of information on the "MAILTO" tag for HTML.
> Yes, what I mean is that I cannot find any more detailed information on
> how to finetune this nice tag.
Well, there isn't much to the tag, mainly just the address:
<a href="mailto:foo@company.com">Send mail to me here</A>
> One of the things I would like to do is to have a hypertext link for our
> internal users to click on with a MAILTO tag. The address that they will
> be sending to (destination email addr.) must not be seen or must be
> UNKNOWN to them.
>
> Q.1 - How can I achieve this in HTML ?
> Any ideas ?
This isn't an HTML problem, it's an adminsitrative issue.
> Q.2 - What about an email ALIAS on SMTP ?
> Maybe then I can send to the ALIAS with the MAILTO tag and the users
> would not be able to pick up the destination addr. at all !!
Not entirely true, but a good start.
I could telnet to the port 25 on the mail server and say:
EXPN mailalias
and depending on the server, it'd gladly tell me who was getting the mail
for that alias.
The best thing to do is to write a small script on the server that will
pick up the mail (i.e. you implement a cgi-bin form) and then the script
mails the intended recepient. Alternately, write a script that the mail
alias points to that sends mail to the right place,
> Q.3 - What about FORMS ?
>
> I'm using a custom CGI forms proceesing engine on Windows-NT/95 and
> would like to know if forms can solve this issue for me.
See Above.
> Q.4 - Can the VALUE attribute be used with the MAILTO tag ?
>
> For example : I would like to fill in a predetermined SUBJECT when the
> MAILTO tag is used in Netscape.
> The Value attribute woks well with forms I've seen.
Again, this doesn't work. How about inserting a default header
after-the-fact with the script I mentioned above.
> I'm currently using Hotdog v2.53 as my HTML editor and the MAILTO
> function is limited here.
Ergh, you should go and read the HTML spec instead of trying to code with
a silly gui-based html builder. Use a text editor, _learn_ the spec, and
apply it. You will be limited if you allow all of your knowledge of html
to come second-hand from the people that wrote the editor.
--john
