>>Now for a tough one. I have no idea how to do this.
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>>The general layout of the problem is a form which would be getting its data in various ways - directly into a keyboard, as HTML ASP page, be faxed and returned filled (equal to keyboard) and - now this one I don't know how to do - sent over e-mail and returned.
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>>How the hell may I have a thing which can be sent via e-mail in any form, to have it returned in the same form _with_ additional data, and still keep those additional data readable by some reasonably simple (or at least feasible) routine? What can be done in this case?
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>>I've seen original information being sent over e-mail - simple quoting may distroy a text beyond (programmatic) recognition. I have no idea what may happen to it if user returns it formatted in any convenient way. I may end up giving the returned e-mail to an operator to read and retype, which is not the desired degree of automation.
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>I've encountered this problem also and it comes down to a lack of layout standards for email. Unless you know what client software the receiver is using, you are stuck with plain text. After much searching I decided that the best solution was to *really* encourage the use of the WWW based form.<g>
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>I did lay out a (really ugly) email form that instructed input to be either at the end of lines or on lines by itself, I then parsed for the key strings and assumed everything up the the next key string was input (after using TRANSFORM to remove the most common quote symbols). The form looked something like this.
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>First Name:
>Last Name:
>Address on next line:
>

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>Of course if the key strings get overwritten then everything falls apart so I preprocess and check for all the key strings and write to a reject file if they are not found. This has actually worked better than I thought it would, only a few respondents have insisted on reformating into something that the program can't understand.

Sounds at least a bit encouraging. I've come up with another idea (aka lightbulb), that I could have a full HTML page attached to the message, and that page would be a complete input form, with some Java or whatever++ inside, which would then generate a neatly formated text with results, and send it as automatic return mail. Am I sufficiently insane, not sufficiently insane, or this simply can't be done?