MS Outlook interact with a web form??

marms

I have a PHP Contact Managment System of which my client has asked for a new feature which does not seem feasable. I need advice or ideas of the possiblites.

Here is the senerio:
They click on the mailto: link from a page that has the client's info and this page also has field to add notes to the account. Their Outlook pops up to send them an email, they type up the email and click send. This is where they want the "magic" to happen. Is it possible through vbscript, JavaScript or something to have the text from that email populate in that "notes" field on the web page and better yet submit the form automaticly?

They want to make sure their users log all their emails sent to the clients in the notes of the contact managment system. As of now, I have told them to use "copy/paste" and do this stuff manually, but they claim some of their users are to "stupid" to do this.

Any suggestions for the "challenge"?

Thanks

devinemke

rather then use standard HTML mailto links, why not write your own mail form that collects the data, sends the email and also sends the data to the database or wherever it ultimately needs to go?

Roger_Ramjet

Yes, it would be possible in Outlook using VBA and Data Access Pages, according to MickeySoft, but don't bother trying. There are just too many things you will have to worry about. Outlook forms are just a total pain in the ass.

The simple approach would be to have an email form on the webpage. Your user types up the email they want to send and then clicks send. This pops up their email client with the message already included, and also logs the email. No way to actually prove that they sent the email of course, except by querying their mailbox for sent messages - good luck with that if it's an Exchange server.

I'm assuming that you want it to go via their email client so that they get their corporate stationary and sig file included.

marms

Yes, it needs to go through their own email client for the reasons you listed and it has to go through their own mail server due to "brokerage compliance" issues I am not familiar with myself. Also, in my experience if you send from a web form and slap their the user's email in the "from" (when in this case it really isn't from their account since their mail server is not the extranet web site's mail server) the email ends up in the recipient's junk mail if they get it at all in most cases.

marms

"The simple approach would be to have an email form on the webpage. Your user types up the email they want to send and then clicks send. This pops up their email client with the message already included, and also logs the email."

How do I go about doing this? I want to see if they will go for this, but I don't know how to have a form submit popup outlook and populate the "body" with their text and also how it sends it to a query insert page at the same time.

Thanks

Roger_Ramjet

With an event script html events

Now best thing is, if you don't know how to do this already, that you read up and learn about html events and how to use them. So, I'm not going to write any code for you, but I will help you when your doesn't work. So have a go yourself.

Hint, the <a> tag has events like other tags, and its mailto: to link to their email client.

marms

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I have something, but there is a problem. It will submit to the next page and pop up outlook at the same time while populating the "To:", "Subject:", and "Body:". The problem is that in the email client the Body typed into the textarea shows up as one long string with no line breaks. How do I send it with the line breaks? Thanks.

 
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
<!--

function PopUpOutlook(email,subject,body) {
    var output = 'mailto:';

    output += email;
    output += '&subject=' + subject;
    output += '&body=' + body;
location.href = output;
}
//-->
</SCRIPT>

<form name="MailIt" method="post" action="test_mail.php">
Email<input type="Text" name="email" value=""><br>
Subject<input type="Text" name="subject" value=""><br>
Body<textarea name="body" cols="15" rows="4"></textarea><br>
<input type="Submit" value="Submit" onclick="PopUpOutlook(this.form.email.value,this.form.subject.value,this.form.body.value)">
</form>

Roger_Ramjet

nl2br

will convert text \n to html <br>

marms

Oh, I was talking about on the JavaScript side of thing that pops up Outlook and where PHP is not involved.

I found it. I have to put the JavaScript escape() function around my variables for it to put in the breaks.

Example:

output += '&body=' + escape(body);

Thanks again.

Roger_Ramjet

Sorry, I was not looking at your code and forgot that the message body was user input not db data. Still you leant some more javascript, well done.

marms

I have put this idea into place on a PHP app where they enter text into a textarea field and submit it to a database and then some JavaScript opens their email client "Outlook" and populates the same text to send. The goal was to be able to log all emails sent throught the PHP Contact MAnagment system.

The problem is that their Outlook does not send the email with their "Signature" text at the bottom like it does when they start an email in the normal fashion. Does anyone know why this is and how I can make sure it does with the JavaScript below?

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript"> 
<!-- 

function PopUpOutlook(email,subject,body) { 
    var output = 'mailto:'; 

    output += email; 
    output += '&subject=' + escape(subject); 
    output += '&body=' + escape(body); 
location.href = output; 
} 
//--> 
</SCRIPT>

Thanks