Using Forms in HTML Email
A question came up on one of the dev lists. Can you use a form successfully in an html email? The answer is yes and no.
Where are the gotchas?
- Hotmail strips out some of the form elements necessary to make the form work, and worse, it APPEARS okay in the hotmail browser window. The result? The user takes the time to fill out the form, clicks the button . . . and nothing happens. Workaround– include a link to a webpage version of the form at the top of the email form with a note to users of Hotmail.
- POST doesn’t work as a form function in MacMail. Workaround– use GET instead, which writes the form functions to the query string of the page they’re posted to.
- Tabbing doesn’t work in Outlook or Outlook Express, and may be confusing to users of those programs, since hitting the tab key will switch the focus to somewhere other than in your form. No workaround known.
- Javascript doesn’t work, so validation has to be done server side.
- Outlook 2007, since it uses the Word 2007 engine, apparently does not support the form, input or textarea tags, which you’d need for this. Workaround? Same as for Hotmail.
- It’s rumored that many spamcatchers are set up to look for form elements. If this is so, best case is that many of your emails don’t make it to their intended recipients. Worst case is you get labelled as a spammer.
So the bottom line is to weigh the variables before using a form in html email. You might do better to just send a link to the online form.
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