PLEASE HELP! How do you add a comment box and have the comments sent to your email in Dreamweaver 8?

First of all WARNING! DANGER!

A properly designed comment box is a highly complex piece of software.

Why?

A comment box is two parts. (1) The web form that you design in Dreamweaver, along with the button to send the comment, and (2) a script that sits on a web server, that processes the data that the form sent, and sends it along to your email.

Writing a script that sends the comment along is pretty simple, for anyone that knows PHP or ASP or any of a dozen other scripting languages. The problem is that a SIMPLE script will open you up to attacks from hackers and spammers, and before you know it, no one is getting any mail from you because all your messages end up in their bulk/junk mail folder. Or worse, they get deleted before they even end up in ANY folder. Or even worse, your whole account gets suspended because your ISP or web hosting company thinks that YOU are the spammer, and the only way to fix things is to get a court order to look at the server logs and prove it wasn't you.

Does that sound like a mess? I've seen it happen.

As I said, writing a SIMPLE script that sends the email is easy... and with a bit of searching, you can find a bunch of free scripts that will do it for you.

BUT if you want this functionality without the associated risk, then...

1) The script will have to keep the comments in a database before it sends them along.

2) The script will have to track how many comments came from each user, and limit the number of comments per hour or per day.

3) The script will need to monitor how many emails it's sending to you, and send them out in an evenly spaced manner, depending on what your web host allows... it could be no more than 1 email every 6 seconds, or it could be no more than 200 emails per hour, or it could be both.

Some extra optional but desirable features...

4) Some way to identify spam and not bother sending it to you. For example if a comment is nothing but links to three or more websites, it's probably spam.

5) A way to identify that the comment came from a human and not a spam-bot... have a Captcha image along with the comment and make the commenter type in the word or code displayed there. Kind of like the Yahoo sign-up process.

As you can see, getting those comments emailed to you can be a complicated issue. I've found that in most cases, it's actually easier to just store the comments in a database, the log into the website yourself as an admin and view the comments that way instead.