Problem with FormMail

Posted by ninjadaisy on September 18, 2005, 6:17 am

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Hi folks -

Please excuse my lack of knowledge...I really don't know much about
CGI, so I hope that I'm in the right place. Anyway:

I manage the website of a small nonprofit. The site uses a number of
forms - for signing up for mailing lists, offering feedback, etc. The
forms are processed thru FormMail, which I believe was configured by
the ISP (but I inherited this site from someone else, so I'm not
entirely sure).

Here's the issue: The forms frequently "crap out," so to speak. What's
strange is that they'll work fine for a while - sometimes for months on
end - but then this error will start appearing upon submission:

"Internal Server Error: The server encountered an internal error or
misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please
contact the server administrator, webmaster@xxxxx.org and inform them
of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that
may have caused the error. More information about this error may be
available in the server error log."

I need to mention - that this happens for *all* of the forms
simultaneously, when it happens....right now, out of the 6 or 7 forms
that we have up on the site, none of them are working. The rest of the
site is fine. This was not precipitated by any changes to any of the
forms - they were all working fine, and then they all just stopped
working.

The site gets free hosting from a local nonprofit ISP, and their tech
support is almost nonexistent - so it will be days before they fix the
problem, and I doubt that I'll be able to get them on the phone so that
they can explain to me what the problem is. So, I guess my question is
- has anyone had a similar problem with FormMail before (or maybe it's
not a FormMail problem?), and is there something that I can do to fix
things on my end without waiting for my ISP? I do have access to the
CGI-bin.

If you need any further info - and I'm sure that I've probably left
something important out - kindly let me know. Thanks!

- Ali