Form Question

[chad556]

We are an agency that monitors police, fire, ems, and other emergency communications. When we hear a major incident happening we send a text message via email to the local media and Public Information Officials statewide. Here's how it works:

I hear a call go out on the radio that the media counts on being notified of. I open my email client and write short message to an address that goes to all of our media contacts. If the event is a house fire, I send the email to the "fire" email address, from our agency email account. All media people who's phones and pagers receive messages from the email I sent the message to, will get the alert. There are 5 different emails. One for Fire calls, another for Police and ems calls, one for all calls in northern Arizona, one for only minor incidents, and another for messages only us "dispatchers" can see.

What we need is a simple form that we can put on our website that consists of a text area box (no more than 160 characters preferably), and then a drop down box with all 5 different alert types I mentioned above. The submit button would say "SEND ALERT" and when pressed the typed message would be sent to the address specified in the drop down box.

There are a couple very important things that would be required though. The most important is that the only text delivered is what the author typed in the text area- nothing more. I have used form generators from the web and all seem to send extra crap like the IP address of the sender, or colons, etc

Second thing: The subject of each alert must be APSN ALERT and the replyto or sender must be depicted as news(at)apsn.us

The website is www.apsn.us

I dont have much to pay someone, but dont expect it for free either, Please let me know if you can help us.

 

[JayT]

This shouldn't be much of a problem using php's mail() function.

I designed a job board that emails an employer a message whenever someone applies to his job ad.

The subject line is automatically set, the employer's email address is pulled from the database and inserted in the TO: line. My admin email address is pulled from the database and entered into the From: line.

The message is sent with no added information or symbols than what I've told it to send.

This could work for your particular situation as well. You could enter the alert types into a database, as well as the email addresses of those on your alert roster for that particular alert. When you select an Alert Type from the drop down menu, all the email addresses of those individuals listed under that type of alert would automatically be placed in the CC or BCC field of the mail function.

The information in the textarea would populate the email body and when you hit "SEND ALERT" - out it goes - just as you want it.

Your Web hosting service must allow php scripts and have access to a mysql database. You would need scripts to add, edit and delete the email addresses, and similar scripts for the alert types.

The alert types may not change that often, but the emails addresses might.

This is very doable.

Have you any programming skills?