Build a HTML Email Sending Form

User feedback is critical to most websites. The simplest way to do this is to publish your email and make a link to a URL that reads something like mailto: yourname@yourdomain.com. When a person clicks on the link, their default email client (ex: Outlook) is open and they can email you a message.

In many cases this works great. But if you do this, spammers will collect your email from your site using email havesters. Publishing an e-mail in this way must be avoided. (You can even use javascript to prevent this spam problem, but that’s for another time.)

Another way is to make a form that users complete and submit you an email. This has the advantage that you can request specific information in your html form. You make the form and use the mailto: in the form’s ACTION field.  But when you do this, you’re still stuck with the same problem – Web Form Spam.

So how do you make a form to send email? It’s easy, you use a programming language such as PHP or ASP.  You write the script so it will take all the form fields and email them to you.  Another alternative is to use an online form generator.  They will normally 14Keep just do all the hard work for you and it’s really easy.

There are also pre-written PHP and ASP formmail scripts that you put on your site.  These scripts work for the most part with little programming on your end and some of them are even free.  The only drawback to these programs is sometimes you need to do some server configuration.  They are also not very good at preventing web form spam.

It’s recommendedthat you find a good online form generator that will do all this work for you.  We recommend Send Email Form.  They will get your web forms working with little trouble and you can even try them for free.

Creating a Form on your site to send email isn’t hard if you know where to look and you can also avoid the dreaded email form spam.