Expression® Web Design

Simple Contact Methods

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

There are other ways of course for users to send you an e-mail from your website if you were relying on FrontPage Server Extensions and now your hosting company is no longer supporting them.  However these will are not as reliable, but just as using FrontPage Server Extensions to process the form, these will also make your e-mail address susceptible to bots that crawl the Internet for e-mail addresses (to sell to spammers).  Using something like Jmail or ASPEMail to help you process the form will protect your e-mail address and should not pose a problem to users.

Mailto Form Action

This is probably one of the worst ones to use.  This will usually generate error messages like this one.  The message is benign, but your users might not completely read the message or understand it.  If they hit cancel, you will not be contact.

This form is being submitted using e-mail.
Submitting this form will reveal your e-mail address to the recipient, and will send the form data without encrypting it for privacy.

You may continue or cancel this submission.

And depending on the way the user has his computer set-up, he might get another warning message similar to this one:  "A website wants to open web content using this program on your computer". 

This message is not threatening, but to have two warning messages come up on the same web site when the user hits submit on the form might generate some concern.  If the user chooses Don't Allow, the message will not be sent.

Also, if the user does allow the e-mail client to send the information, the user might have to re-enter the information.  The input fields might not transfer over to the e-mail and the user now needs to re-type the information.

If you need to use this method, it is something like

<form method="post" action="mailto:name@example.com">
<input type="text" name="Message">
<input type="submit" value="Submit Your Comments">
</form>

You can also get the source code:
Text (157 bytes) | Zipped (268 bytes)

E-Mail Hyperlink

Expression Web will allow you to easily create a hyperlink for e-mail purposes.  Once you are in the Edit Hyperlink dialog box, on the lower left, you will see E-Mail Address.  You can click on this and the dialog box will change.  You can enter your e-mail address (and a subject if desired).

The code would be something like:

<a href="mailto:name@example.com?subject=From Your Website">
E-Mail Me</a>

Or if you did not choose a subject:

<a href="mailto:name@example.com">E-Mail Me</a>

The Issues with These "Simple Methods"

While these are simple to place on your website, there are problems.  I have already pointed out some issues with the mailto: form action.  Another problem with these methods though require the user to have a default e-mail client set up.  Usually this is done on a personal computer, but if the user is at the library or Internet café, this probably will not be set up.

Keep in mind that sometimes easier is not so easy for others.

Processing the Form with ASPEmail

Saturday, February 21, 2009

Once you have created your form, you probably want the information e-mailed to you.  With FrontPage, this was very easy to do, FrontPage Server Extensions did most of the work for you.  Now though, you might find yourself needing another way to have the form results e-mailed to you.  Depending on your web hosting provider, there is probably a number of ways.  One way we mentioned earlier was to process the form using the J-Mail ASP Component.

There are a few other methods as well, one being the ASPEmail component from Persits.  This is another very common ASP component that most web hosting providers will offer. 

Once you have determined that ASPEMail is installed, you can download an example from this blog to try out.  Remember to change the SMTP server (which you can get from your hosting company) and to change the recipient e-mail's address (on / about line eleven in the example) to your e-mail address.

ASPEMail Source Code

Text (1,065 bytes) | Zipped File  (contains two text files - 1,533 bytes) | Zipped File (contains two ASP pages - 1,533 bytes)