Forms in Emails?

Is it possible to include a form within an email?

[dagar]

I want to insert a form within an email. Is this possible, how do I collect the results if it is etc etc.
ie: the form sits in the email, people fill it in and send it back via email. Then I need to collect the data.

[celerityfm]

You are facing a tough challenge--

If you knew everyone recieving the email was capable of displaying HTML in their Email reader then you could code the form into an HTML based E-mail without too many problems (have it post/get to a script on your server).

However not everyone can read HTML based messages (or wants to!), so your best bet is to give everyone a link to a form on your website.. and if your concerned with matching up their email address with yours, why not do soemthing like this:

[foo.com...]

php/asp/pl whatever. :) That should do the trick.

[The_Warden]

Sure you can as long as the user has a E-mail client that handles HTML. If you are sending the results of the form back via e-mail then you should set your ENCTYPE like so, ENCTYPE="text/plain" for the form. This will format the data somewhat nice for you to read in a e-mail message. I would suggest if you do have the data sent via e-mail to have your form element names descriptive so you know what the data is when it's sent to you.

But you could also setup the form to have it contact a webpage to process it quickly and then store the data in a database or some flat file. To do this you would have to pass the form values via the URL (action property of form element).

Is this the info you were looking for?

[Sanenet]

It is possible to send an email containing both HTML and plain text (multipart messages)... although this makes the message that much longer! You need to set the MIME type multipart/alternative, with a unique string to differenciate between the HTML part and the text part of the email.

Don't know which programming language you're using, but if you sniff around you can probably find some prewritten code that lets you do this.

[dagar]

Thanks for the info people. Will have to figure out how it would work for me. Unfortunately we have a number of complications which would render some solutions innefective. I will work through the info you've all given me and hopefully come up with a workable solution.
Thanks again.

[The_Warden]

Let us know your restrictions and maybe we can help you out? Give you more of a direct solution instead of a partial one.

[dagar]

Problem 1:
We have a subscriber base containing people who can read HTML and those that can't. This is no biggie, since we have them marked in our mailing list

Problem 2:
Of those that can recieve HTML emails, certain companies they are employed by restrict access to internet (email access but no internet access, go figure). Meaning that once they've filled in the form, they can't submit it to be processed online. (We use ASP). Now that info we don't have.

If you can tell me how the form data can be formatted and inserted into a reply email on the client side...maybe that would work. But I'm probably dreaming.

[The_Warden]

dagar
Problem 1 & 2: Mmm... geez now these are tough ones. Those that do not have internet access well you can't do much about that. The only way I can possibly see this working is the following..

1. Send a text mesage with just a link to the form on-line.
2. Use javascript in your HTML message (but support is limited). A lot of e-mail clients do not support javascript and the ones that do are usually turned off either by user or firewall blocking.
3. Send link to all users to access form on-line.

I do not think there is a way to reach all of your audience. The ones without Internet access.. well there's nothing you can do about that.