Handling an email form

I can create a valid html email containing a form and an input and submit tag in it. With this I wish to call a script on my website and have it take the value of the input and update a record in a mysql table. The concept is pretty straight-forward, but I'm having no luck with the execution. For one thing - my email client insists on opening a new browser window as soon as I click on the input tag. That is probably some email setting that I'll have to dig into. And it does it again when I click on the submit button. But the real problem is that the script called from this email form doesn't seem to respond. I have tested the form right from my website and it manages to call the script correctly and I have echoed out my progress to verify my code works, but it just doesn't happen from the email. What's the trick - or can't this be done?