Thread: Blank emails on some form submittions

Seldomly, but still enough to worry about, my client gets emails submitted from a form I made on his site that just reads:

'Values submitted from web site form'

There is no other information that comes through.

His form page is http://www.steppin-out.co.uk/contact.html

Please advise anyone?

People are probably hitting the submit button without filling in any information. Add validation to the fields so it can't be submitted with empty data

Originally Posted by Watdaflip

People are probably hitting the submit button without filling in any information. Add validation to the fields so it can't be submitted with empty data

Validation has always been there:

A lot of the fields have to be filled in so that can't be the reason...

Sorry I gave you the wrong form url. It's this one:

http://www.steppin-out.co.uk/music_menu.html

But as above, it DOES have questions that require filling in.

Since you already have validation, i can only suppose that someone is visiting your action.php page.It is enough to visit the action.php page, to recieve a blank email. You can avoid this either using a session, that will prevent the email submission if no session value is found by the script, or add a validation (in the php script) that will look at all fields, and if all of them are blank, it will not submit.

Add this code as first line of your php script, immediately after <?PHP

if ($_POST == ""){
header ("Location: pagetogoto.html");
exit;
}


replacing pagetogoto.html with the actual page name (can be an error page or simply the index page)

When you say immediately after, like... next line?

Like this:

<?PHP
if ($_POST == ""){
header ("Location: index.html");
exit;
}
$mailto = "enquiries@steppin-out.co.uk";
$email = $HTTP_POST_VARS['email'];
if ($email == "") {
$email = $mailto;
}
$mailsubj = "Music Menu Contact Form";
$mailhead = "From: $email\n";
reset ($HTTP_POST_VARS);
$mailbody = "Values submitted from web site form :\n";
while (list ($key, $val) = each ($HTTP_POST_VARS))
{
if ($key!="submit")
{
$mailbody .= "$key : $val\n";
}
}
mail($mailto, $mailsubj, $mailbody, $mailhead);
?>

Correct.

However, ABVFP will also perform php validation (those who have Javascript disabled in their browsers will not be able to override the built in Javascript validation) and will automatically perform also a form submission check.

Thanks George. I have made the change and hopefully this has now cured my client's problem. I knew you would be along to solve it soon!

Many Thanks

Sorry for this, the above code might not work in some cases, please replace it with this one:

if (count($_POST) == 0){
header ("Location: index.html");
exit;
}

Originally Posted by navaldesign

Sorry for this, the above code might not work in some cases, please replace it with this one:

if (count($_POST) == 0){
header ("Location: index.html");
exit;
}

It didn't work, I had two more come through. I'll try the new code thank you.

Yes, this one works ok.

At least one of the two blanks that you got was from me, maybe both, i don't remember

Ah ok, well thank you for your kind help anyway. It's greatly appreciated.