Re: congrats kelvin....also, mail receipts for Sven

[Wiggins d'Anconia]

With you evil people out there ;-) I am glad I use Mozilla. Actually I just wanted to state that even this is not fool proof anymore since thank god mozilla has a feature where you can shut off image loading in the mail client.

http://danconia.org

Peter Kappus wrote:

Kelvin...Congrats on your CGI success! Yes, it is a simple but easy to
forget fact that the physical location of your documents on the server is
not the same as the URL... if you're document root (set in your httpd.conf
file) is "/var/www/" and inside it you have a folder called "myStuff" then
the URL will be http://localhost/myStuff and NOT
http://localhost/var/www/myStuff (simple but tricky the first few
times......still, important to remember)

and to Sven,
I don't believe that SMTP supports read receipts (or delivery confirmation)
but I may be wrong...(anybody?) This is where the evil transparent tracking
gif's come into play. But they require that you use the even more evil HTML
email which I don't recommend under any circumstances despite the fact that
marketing folks just love it. The downside is that not everybody can read
HTML email and you generally have to send both a plaintext and HTML versions
which make even a short message about 30k.

BUT, assuming you MUST have delivery confirmation, the trick is to use HTML
email and do the following:

1) Create a CGI on a web server that accepts an email address as a parameter
and delivers a single pixel transparent gif to the client while recording
the email address in a DB or text-file (or whatever)

2) embed a customized link to this CGI from the email you're sending (<img
src="http://myserver/mySneakyCGI.cgi?email=recipientAddress@;somedomain.com">
) (remember to URL encode the address)

your CGI might look something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use CGI qw/:standard/;

open(LOG,">>pathToLog.txt");
#write a timestamp and the email address to our log file
write LOG scalar(localtime()) . "\t" . param("email"); close(LOG);

#now send our image
open(IMG,"pathToImgFile.gif");
#if you're on Windoze make sure you specify binmode #(otherwise your image will get mangled)
binmode(IMG);

#send our mime-type to the browser #(so it doesn't get confused)
print "Content-Type: image/gif\r\n\r\n";
binmode(STDOUT); #use binmode for our output filehandle, too
print <IMG>; #print the whole image file to the browser
close(IMG); #clean up


####THE END########
(Can somebody show me how this would look using DBI instead of text files?)
DISCLAIMER: I haven't tried to run this...it probably doesn't work as-is.

Now your log file knows when the email was read, and by who (and how many
times!)
and your poor unsuspecting user is none the wiser. mwuhahah! NOTE: you
could easily use a name, or customerID or whatever you like in your query
string that you send to the CGI.

just remember to use your perl powers for good, instead of evil.

Good luck.
-Peter


-----Original Message-----
From: Kelvin McWha [mailto:kelvin.mcwha@;btinternet.com]
Sent: Tuesday, November 12, 2002 8:15 AM
To: 'zentara'; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: RE: Unable to run cgi script


Got it, after spending two days on just this problem I have found the
answer with the help of David T_G and David Kirol and others, many
thanks.

And the answer was

Setting ScriptAlias /cgi-bin /home/kelvin/cgi-bin/

Means that I still need http://localhost/

But I don't now need /home/Kelvin

So the final path is http://localhost/cgi-bin/myscript.cgi

Simple eh!

thanks again

Kelvin

Ps just spotted that Scott suggested this within one of his answers
yesterday

-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:Linux@;onion.perl.org] On Behalf Of
zentara
Sent: 12 November 2002 14:15
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Unable to run cgi script

On Mon, 11 Nov 2002 12:27:25 -0000, [EMAIL PROTECTED]

(Kelvin

McWha) wrote:

System is
SuSe 8.1 stand-a-lone
Apache 1.3

Have got Apache running OK and tested it in standalone mode using
http://localhost
which shows the appropriate test page

Can you get http://localhost/~kevin to run?

In SuSE 8.1 you need to enabled user home dirs.

Look at /etc/sysconfig/apache  and see if you have home directories
enabled.




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