Tips for contact forms

Users making errors with their email addresses

[koan]

Here's something that is plaguing me: people use my contact form on my my web sites to send me messages and I take the time to write back a decent answer, yet, so many times, I get an "failure to deliver" bounce message because they made an error while inserting their address.

Any tips to avoid this in the future? It discourages me to actually reply back to my users. I guess I should start by creating another "confirm your email" field? It just seems to me that they'll just copy paste the erroneous address.

[bill]

You need to look at e-mail validation via your form. There are various scripts out there that will not only check to see whether a valid e-mail address format has been used, but also some will actually ping the mail address to see whether it is an active account. I can't vouch for the validity of this approach, but I've seen it mentioned. Normally the best we can hope for is an address in the correct format.

If the address issue is very important you could also send out an auto-responder mail to anyone who fills out your form. If you get a bounce from that address then you could ignore the message altogether.

[koan]

Hi bill, I do use some javascript validation of email formats, but they often will make one tiny, yet logically valid, mistake that will render the address useless. I think your approach of sending a confirmation message is great! I didn't think of that. Thanks a bunch.