Contact Form Help

[FairwayandIsle]

I need advice on the correct way to set up my contact form. I am currently using a “MAILTO” action. When I test the form I receive the following warning from IE:

This form is being submitted using email.

Submitting this email will reveal your email address to the recipient, and will send the form data without encrypting it for privacy.

The user then gets another warning:

A program is trying to automatically send email on your behalf. Do you want to allow this?

How should I set up the form so that users don’t run away in fear?

I appreciate whatever help or direction you can point me in.

[RESynergy]

What program are you using to make the form and what language is it in? it may not be a relevant question, but I do all my contact forms in the scripting language "PHP". Any messages like that would be being sent in the php code itself. If that is the case, you need to open the code up in a text editor like note pad (as a minimum), find the place where those messages are and delete them. If this proposed solution applies to your problem I suggest you post the code here before you delete things if you are not sure what you are doing and definitely make a copy of the original code incase it doesn't work.

[FairwayandIsle]

I am not using PHP for the form itself (although I am not apposed to that) I used simple HTML, take a look:

<form id="contactus" action="MAILTO:info@fairwayandisle.com" method="post" enctype="text/plain" onsubmit="return checkForm(this);">

<label>Name: <br><input type="text" name="Name" size="35" width="35"></label> <br><br>

<label> Phone: <br><input type="text" name="Phone"size="35" width="35"></label><br><br>

<label>Email: <br><input type="text" name="Email" size="35" width="35"></label><br><br>

<label>When would you like us to contact you? <br><input type="text" name="Time" size="35" width="35'></label><br><br>

<label>How may we help you?<input type="text" name="comments"> <br>
<textarea rows="6" cols="35">
</textarea><br><br>

<input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit">
</FORM>

[RESynergy]

I placed your code on a page on my site. It sent a message to you without any of those warnings you mentioned. It must be something with either your operating system (XP?) or browser(I>E>?) settings. Hope this helps!

I used firefox. I might be able to test it later with IE.

[AaronSOLD]

Mailto: forms are tough since many people use web-based email and I've seen those security warnings too.

I would use a php program or something else....

[REW Fergus]

Internet Explorer sends the first warning as a security measure. The user has no way to know their e-mail address will be revealed by the sending of the form. The second warning is most likely from Outlook Express and is meant to combat worms that broadcast e-mails in the background without cluing in the user.

If you want to avoid those warnings, you must code a script to handle your mail sending or hire someone to do so for you. PHP is the most popular option for doing so.

[FairwayandIsle]

Thank you for the help. I was able to recode the form using PHP. No more warnings.