How to use a variable with a mailto email address recepient

I am trying to have a mailto form that will send text entered to an email address entered above. The email form is the variable "to". how could I have it so when the form is up, someone enters their email the variable to is assigned that email. Here is my code. Thanks in advance -Ben

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<!--chtml include "//webinfo/incs/header.inc"-->

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

    <head>
    <title>Mailto Variable</title>
    <link href="/webinfo/webinfo.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" />
    </head>

    <body>
    <h1>Mailto Basic Demo</h1>

    <form action="basic.mailto" method="post">
       <tr>
            <td>Your E-mail Address:</td>
            <td><input type="text" name="to" value="" size="55" /></td>
        </tr>
       <table border="0" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="0">
        <tr>

        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td>Name:</td>
            <td><input type="text" name="sendername" value="" size="55" /></td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td valign="top">Comments:</td>
            <td><textarea name="comments" rows="15" cols="55">

</textarea></td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td></td>
            <td><input type="submit" value="Send Comment" />
            <input type="reset" value="Clear Comment" /></td>
        </tr>
        </table>
    </form>
    <!--chtml include "//webinfo/incs/footer.inc"-->
    </body>

</html>

Here is basic.mailto

    <to>"to"</to>

Solution

If you intend to use mailto: to send an email, then your form-tag would have to look something like this:

<form method="post" action="mailto:[email protected]">

However, using that method is not a very good one. That method relies on the user having a default e-mail client set up, that can be used to send the email through.

Instead, I would suggest that you use a server-side language to post the email. Have a look at PHPs mail() for instance.

If you intent to send e-mails, it is also worth looking in to web services like Postmark to make sure that your emails are delivered properly and not getting caught in SPAM-filters. There are a libraries for most server-side languages that you can use if you like to use Postmark: http://developer.postmarkapp.com/developer-libs.html