What are the possible ways to send a feedback e-mail form?

Question

My professor in the uni has asked me to design a simple website with a basic feedback form.

• the form should NOT use 'mailto' for sending the feedback form e-mail
• the form should NOT use server-side scripting (PHP, etc) for sending the feedback form e-mail.

Is is possible at all to send an e-mail from a website form without using any of these 2 options? Is there yet another option for sending an e-mail in this situation?

Answer 1

No. The client-server model used by HTTP has the client and the server, both of which the professor has disallowed you to use. (Email does not use HTTP, but it's apparent in your question that you need to send mail from an HTTP context, and you need a computer on which to do that.)

Answer 2

You could embed a Java applet or ActiveX control which does it for you.

Answer 3

I am not aware of a solution without using any of these 2 options.

Mybe your professor only doesn't whant that you scipt a solution. I guess there are plenty of feedback solutions as services on the web. Most web hoster also have a mail cgi script or something like this installed...

Answer 4

The professor agreed, that any of the following 4 technologies can be used for this project:

• Java applet
• ActiveX component
• Javascript
• Flash (Actionscript).

Many thanks for the help.

(How exactly sending an e-mail is going to be achieved with these technologies without referencing i.e. 'mailto' in Javascript or in the flash application or without referencing the server is going to be the strange part of this coding though).