# Sending form info via e-mail; formatting output?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sending-form-info-via-e-mail-formatting-output/343283
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [February 6, 2006, 7:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sending-form-info-via-e-mail-formatting-output/343283 "2006-02-06T19:50:41Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Eonwe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eonwe)
#### Post date: [February 6, 2006, 7:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sending-form-info-via-e-mail-formatting-output/343283/1 "2006-02-06T19:50:41Z")
I’ve been tasked with making an ‘online’ form for my company’s _intra_net for people to fill out internally and send requests to our department.
We don’t have any ability to use php and related languages on our intranet, so I’m just using the oh-so-exciting mailto: command.
This just spits out the content of the form in a [fieldname]=[formcontent] sort of list.
My question is, is there any way to control the format of the output? On review it’s kind of ugly and hard to read.
For that matter, does anyone know of any other methods for extracting the info in a form without using php/asp?
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### Author:  [@Reply](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Reply)
#### Post date: [February 6, 2006, 8:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sending-form-info-via-e-mail-formatting-output/343283/2 "2006-02-06T20:08:27Z")
Which web server is the intranet using?
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### Author:  [@Eonwe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eonwe)
#### Post date: [February 6, 2006, 8:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sending-form-info-via-e-mail-formatting-output/343283/3 "2006-02-06T20:15:28Z")
> [@Reply](#):
>
> Which web server is the intranet using?
See, that’s the thing… the intranet is housed in a folder on one of our network drives… it’s not really a web server at all.
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### Author:  [@Reply](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Reply)
#### Post date: [February 6, 2006, 8:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sending-form-info-via-e-mail-formatting-output/343283/4 "2006-02-06T20:26:43Z")
In that case, um… maybe ask them to download a Word or PDF form, fill out the info, and then save it as another file?
Or maybe you could make a simple Windows program that saves the info to a simple formatted file on the network drive?
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### Author:  [@Reply](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Reply)
#### Post date: [February 6, 2006, 8:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sending-form-info-via-e-mail-formatting-output/343283/5 "2006-02-06T20:32:46Z")
Or you could also use JavaScript to handle the input and then UUencode/base64-encode the formatted response into one long ASCII string, then use [mailto:your@address.com](mailto:your@address.com)?&body=(the string) to send it to another computer. You’d have to UUdecode all the responses at the other end, though.