Extreme Web Traffic blog

So you want to create a basic Email form that you can put some form fields on and have those results emailed to you?  Here’s great news – It’s simple to do.  And the good news is in most cases you don’t even need to be a web developer to do it.  Let’s look at the different ways you can make such a form and get it to send the results right to your inbox.

First the simplist way is to just put a simple mailto: tag in your form’s “action” part.  This is right at the very top of your form’s tag.  In the action section just put the word mailto: and your email address.  That’s all there is to it!

But there’s only one catch – Spammers can find your email and harvest it.  Your email address will be cluttered with spam messages.  So what we really need is a way for you to build a web form that doesn’t expose your email address.

Enter the world of formmail programs.  These are simple programs that do exactly what you want.  They will take your form submissions and convert them into an email message.  Some of them are even good enough to do complex file attachements.  These are great but there’s one snag.  You’ll need to do a little bit of programming.  With these formmail programs you need to adjust which email the results are sent to (likely yours).  also you may even run into server configuration problems, but these are usually overcome with a little bit of work.

A final option is using a full fledged online form generator.  These tools will build you the HTML form code for your site.  You just paste in the code and customize it how you want.  Then your HTML form just works.  If you’re limited in your programming skills this is probably the best choice for you.  Send Email Form is a great online form generator you can try out.

Making HTML Email Forms that send you emails isn’t hard if you can find the right option that fits your needs.