Auto email

I’ve successfully written several CGI scripts with VB.  I'm stumped on a problem at the moment and thought I'd drop you a line to see if you had any ideas.  Basically, I want to get a CGI script to send an email.  Here's the routine: The user fills in a webform and hits submit.  This fires up a CGI (written in VB).  I want the CGI to do 3 things: 1. Store the form info in my database (that's no problem, I've got my CGI doing that); 2. Send an email to a third party (this is the part I'm having difficulty with); and, 3. Send the user a confirmation page (this is also no problem).

One tip I received from a newsgroup was that I have to communicate with a server side application called Sendmail.  Is this correct?  A fellow sent me some code written in C, but I haven't been able to fully decipher it.  I don't want to use mailto:, because I want to take the emailing out of the user's hands, so to speak.  Do you have any suggestions?  I need to know how to speak to SENDMAIL  using my CGI.  I need this information either in Visual Basic (preferably) or plain english.  Alternatively, a translation of the C code to VB would be very useful.

 I want my CGI to 'say' to the email application (residing server side naturally), here' s the address, subject, and body, send it.

Here is the C code I was sent:

/* begin e-mail code */

#define SENDMAIL "/usr/lib/sendmail -t"

void sendEmail(void) {
  FILE *mail;

  if ((mail = popen(SENDMAIL,"w")) == NULL) {
    fprintf(stderr,"Error: Can't open sendmail!\n");
    return;
  }
  fprintf(mail,"To: someone@somewhere.com\n");
  fprintf(mail,"From: wherever@somewhere.com\n");
  fprintf(mail,"Subject: Mail from WWW\n");
  fprintf(mail,"\n");
  fprintf(mail,"This is the body of the mail.\n");
  pclose(mail);
}

/* end e-mail code */