Delivering the contents of a web-form to your fax....
(Information for those creating their own web site - if this sounds complicated, don't panic. Call us for more help.)

How do I get my web-site order-form to send the orders to my fax machine ?

When a form is completed and the 'submit' button is pressed it's usual for the forms contents to be delivered to you by email. Our systems automatically deliver email to fax machines - so it's simply a case of using the address we've allocated @fax.co.uk and the message will pop out of your fax instead.

Ok, but the question remains - how do I get my form to send an email...

There are several ways of achieving this - the overiding factor when deciding the approach is what facilities you have at your ISP / Web-Host. Most good ISP's will have some information on this subject, they will probably have a 'form to email' script installed somewhere on their server for your use and maybe even some example forms. Checkout what your ISP has - look for 'form to email'.

The most common method is to use a 'form to email' 'CGI script', usually installed in the 'cgi-bin' directory. There are many such scripts freely available on the 'net which mostly work in the same way - but the details will vary depending on the script you're using.

The 'action' of the form is set to the location of your 'form to email' script, maybe:
<form name="testform" action="someplace.com/cgi-bin/form2email.pl" >
When the 'submit' button is pressed on the form, the browser wil send the contents of the form to the script you specify.

Usually - as a minimum you'll need to add the recipients email address to the form.
It's added as if it's another field on the form:
<input type="hidden" name="recipient" value="joe.bloggs@fax.co.uk">
In this case we've used the field name 'recipient' but this will depend on what your script requires.
Notice that the type of the field is set to 'hidden' - this simply hides the field so it doesn't show up on the form.

Here's a simplistic example:

<form name="testform" action="someplace.com/cgi-bin/form2email.pl" >

 <p>          <input type="hidden" name="recipient" value="joe.bloggs@fax.co.uk"> </p>
 <p> name:    <input type="text"   name="name">     </p>
 <p> address: <input type="text"   name="address">  </p>
 <p>          <input type="submit" name="Submit" value="Submit"> </p>

</form>

So to deliver the form by email - set the recipients email address to the one we've allocated for you @fax.co.uk - that's it!