Okay, I give up

January 28, 2004 · Comments

I’ve spent way too much time today looking for an email form processor that will take the field data and attach it to an email in vcard format. My clients wants to be able to double click the attachment and have the contact in Outlook. Sounds fair enough and I was hoping it would be easy, but apparently not. I found one script. It’s called aptly enough vCard Mail.

From the description:

* Retrieves the information from a HTML form,
* Translates the specified data into the vCard 2.1 format,
* Sends them to the specified user, along with a vCard as an email attachment.

Absolutely perfect. Exactly what I want. The demo on the site worked so I downloaded it and tried it out.

Only problem is:

# It’s built around a 3 year old Perl version of FormMail, otherwise known as the most insecure way of having an email form on a website. The Perl version of FormMail has been updated in the past year or two to deal with the security holes, but it’s probably not a good idea to use it.
# It doesn’t work. I keep getting a server error, chances are there’s something at the host level that’s missing.

I also tried Forms 2 Go which is a very nice GUI for generating PHP form scripts and I’m using it on standard web forms but it doesn’t do the vCard thing. I searched every depository of PHP and Perl scripts, as well as Googled every combination of “php form email vcard” I could think of. Lots and lots of form handlers, none besides the aforementioned one that will specifically attach a vcard.

Suggestions, anyone?

Update: A great big THANK YOU to Erik Barzeski of NSLog(); who saw my pitiful little plea and came to my rescue. He whipped up a little PHP script for me in about 15 minutes while we chatted that does exactly what I want. Thanks again, Erik! I’ll send you some snow, I’m sure you miss not having some where you live. :-)

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