Hello everyone,
I use a contact form by @doobox, and I have a problem with the settings I guess.
I entered my email address in the settings, and the problem is that the messages I receive are sent from my own address, and when I reply it sends the message to myself again.
The sender’s address appears in the message, so I can manage to reply, but that’s annoying.
There is a checkbox in the settings “compatibility mode”
This will switch to the behaviour you want, but as the name of the setting suggests, on some server the form may no longer work when you change that setting. Only one way to find out.
Thanks Gary,
“compatibility mode” was checked and I receive the messages in the way I described. If I uncheck, no message is received.
I’m going to keep it as it is, but is there a contact form that behaves in way I would like to?
There might be a misunderstanding on how a webform can work - the email is always sent from the host of the website to the email address entered in the settings. There is no way that the website host can send the email from the user’s email account !
Therefore the only thing you can work with when a contact request was entered by a user and sent by the website, are the pieces of information entered by the user into the form fields, e.g. the email address entered.
In that sense, I think the contact form works as expected, and I don’t think any other contact form can work differently. However, if you don’t use a webform as contact method, but instead if the website opens the local email program, then you will receive an email from the user directly - but it will no longer be formatted as desired.
See here for an html example:
doobox “mailto stack”.
I admit I didn’t know this, I’m a musician not a programmer.
If I remember well though, when I was using RWs contact form, I was receiving a message from the person who had sent it, and hitting reply would create a message to the sender, and not to myself .
I do have a stack called FormSnap Junior that I won’t use for other reasons, but when a message is received from this stack, hitting reply opens a reply message to the sender.
I have stopped using mailto links a long time ago.
So what happens if someone enters his email address wrong? Does he receive an error message, or a message saying that the email was successfully sent?
I’m using a Doobox stack called Contact Form. Not sure there’s one called mailto stack
Most forms can only let a user know if an email address is not formatted properly, i.e. user@email is not correct but user@email.com is correct.
There is no way to know if a user inputs the wrong email address. That is one benefit of mailto links, as they will definitely use the users own mail program with the correct email address.
Hello Alain,
I might have been a bit quick in my reply. Since I was using the Doobox ‘Contact Form’ myself on a site, I gave it a try - sending myself some “request”. The email I received was sent from the website email account, the one you enter in the stack entry. However, the email also contains a ‘reply-to’ field, and when I reply to this email, it indeed creates a new email with the ‘reply-to’ address. This is the behavior you were describing from other experiences. In the image below the ‘Reply-To’ only shows my name, since my computer already identified the email address to be mine, yet it is a proper email link.
This is a screenshot of the test email I received (I just blurred the various email addresses)
I am not using ‘compatibility mode,’ and it seems that the mail behavior is indeed different with your host than what I see using the same Doobox stack. Sorry, I cannot be of more help, but it doesn’t seem to be an issue with the stack, but perhaps with the email behavior of the host.
As an aside the ‘mailto’ stack was an older stack from Doobox, which is apparently no longer available.
Thanks GKs !
Someone entering a wrong email only happened once, in many years. And I was able to contact that person by phone, he was in the phone directory, and he ended up taking lessons for the last 8 years. If I had missed him I would have lost a few thousands, actually. Glad it didn’t happen.
There are chances that it won’t happen anymore.
This is correct.
In compatibility mode the form is sent from the address you enter in the stack you’d like to receive the emails at. This ensures email is delivered on all servers.
Uncheck compatibility mode, and the form is sent from the email address the person filling the form provides. This is normally the desired behaviour of the receiver as they can then simply click the reply button to reply to the sender.
But this mode will not function correctly on all hosts. Some hosts have a security measure in place that will only allow a form to be sent from the php mail script “from” an email address that is tied to the server.