formmail

the alternative to the mailto action

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  • the mailto action
  • mailto limitations
  • formmail
  • the secret of formmail
  • typical features

the mailto action

It no longer counts as a brainstorm when you remember to put email on your site. Feedback on your site is important to you as well as to your surfers. It's an informal way of gauging the interest level of your site, and a great way to build a feeling of community. Such a feeling is a gateway to repeat visits.

The most common email device used is the mailto action. The mailto action looks like this:

<a href=mailto:me@me.com>mail me</a>

The mailto is a kind of link. It calls compliant email clients, opening them for the surfer to use. There are a couple of parameters you can set to pre-load the email client with information you, the webmistress, want to appear in the resultant mail. Below is the code for pre-loading the subject of the email message.

<a href=mailto:me@me.com?subject=Homepage>mail me</a>

This code will result, for compliant email clients, in the subject field loaded and ready to go with "Homepage" or whatever you choose.

mailto limitations

The first problem with the mailto action might be obvious by now. Note that this works for compliant email clients. That is to say, it doesn't work for all. Which popular clients won't respond to the action? Who knows? There is a handful that I know this will work for. However, there are a lot of email clients out there.

Secondly, a user must actually have an email client for the mailto action to work. What users don't? A common scenario is for AOL users to connect with AOL but surf outside the AOL environment, on the desktop. When a mailto action calls the default email client, it'll call something like Outlook, not the AOL email client the surfer actually uses. To use the mailto action, the user would have to copy the web page's address from the Netscape or Explorer address window and paste it into the go field inside AOL, re-access the page, and then again use the mailto action. I doubt anyone but the most motivated user would go through that trouble.

AOL surfers could hand-copy the email address from the page (assuming the viewable text of the link represents the actual address and isn't an imperative like "Mail Me!") and use their AOL email client, but now we're running the risk of keystroke error. Unless your domain has a catchall email system (assuming the surfer has gotten the domain part of the address correct), you will not get that piece of mail.

Further, many people surf from work, libraries, or friend's machines, making the use of the email client either impossible or undesirable.

formmail

The solution to these problems is what's commonly called formmail. Formmail is the use of an HTML form that, upon the submit action, calls a program located on a server that accepts the contents of the form and then emails these contents to your address.

I'm not going to go into how to actually code your formmail form - it varies from program to program - but I'd like to detail the important reasons you should take the time to implement formmail instead of the mailto action.

Formmail can be found in many places. If you own your own domain, you probably have it as part of the pre-packaged, safe CGI programs your host provides. CGI stands for common gateway interface. CGI programs are powerful programming languages that run on servers (as opposed to scripts running in your browser). Voting booths, formmail, and shopping carts, are common items built by GGI languages and provided by hosting companies to their webmistresses.

Even if you do not have your own domain, ISPs that offer webspace, like AOL, often have formmail programs at the disposal of their users. There are also services floating around the web that will provide formmail for you for "free" (that is, with some embedded advertising in the body of the mail). Remember, the power of formmail is on a server, and not on the surfer's desktop - any server will do. It's all the same to the form's submit action.

the secret of formmail

An HTML form has two kinds of fields, hidden and visible. The visible fields accept input from the surfer. The hidden fields are there for the CGI program. The hidden fields are named with specific names. The values of these fields give the program information to act upon. The CGI program handling the formmail is written to do something with the content or value of a specifically named field and something else with the content or value of another specifically named field.

Hidden fields are the secret to the power of formmail. A formmail program will access both viewable and hidden fields in the form by name of the field in order to find out what actions to take. For instance, with the form-based model, users can still enter their own subject, but this "subject" is a line of text that will appear inside the email, as part of the message. The true subject line of your email will come from a named, hidden field in the form. This will allow you to sort, respond to, and generally handle the email as you see fit.

The user has no control over the hidden fields of the form. With the mailto action, a user can simply alter the subject heading to fit their perceived notions of what the subject of the correspondence should be. Say you have an email contact on your page regarding the size of a boat for sale. With the mailto action, you might entitle the email "boat size." Without a doubt, most users will wipe this out and replace the subject line with "question."

typical features

Formmail typically allows you to setup a thank you page a surfer will be directed to automatically after submission of the form. The address of the thank you, or response, page is in a named hidden field. At the response page, you can thank surfers for their interest and give them whatever options they need to continue along on the site (this is a good place to put in a word about response time to questions).

Formmail programs usually allow you to capture a few variables, such as the surfer's ip address, their browser type (in fancy talk, user agent) as well as the time and date (conveniently inside the message instead of the email headers).

Better CGI programs will also let you set which viewable fields, if any, must be filled out before the form can be submitted. Should a surfer not complete all required fields, they can be directed to a specified page telling them to fill out all required information. Good formmail programs will even error-check the user-input email address, looking for valid addresses.

There is only one real downside to formmail compared to the mailto action. The mailto action uses the surfer's own email client to send you mail. Their return address is automatically sent with the mail. With formmail, the user must input their address into a field in the form. Here you run the possibility of user keystroke error.

One thing to note; to get the functionality out of your formmail program, follow the directions. If the return address of the sender should be called return_address, call it that in the form. The program must recognize the names of your fields to correctly process the value of the field.

Experiment with setting your own hidden fields whose values will appear in your email message. For instance, let's say you have a site about five different cars. You can put an email form in each section of the site, and set a hidden field in each form to reflect the section from which the mail is originating. This can help you discover where your surfer's interest has been piqued.

Formmail is clearly superior to the mailto action. Though the mailto action is a bit more convenient (when it works), formmail is reliable and flexible, and will aid you in collecting commentary from your site.