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I have an html emailer sent out via a program like Mailchimp. The emailer has an embedded contact form using PHP. The form works fine when filled in from a browser, but returns a blank email when filled in from the email client.

Any ideas?

Thanks Jane

Jane Wood
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  • HTML forms in an email = Bad Idea (tm); much of its former glory has faded into oblivion. – Ja͢ck Oct 04 '12 at 09:02
  • God no. That's asking for trouble. – SpaceBeers Oct 04 '12 at 09:04
  • @Jack What's `(tm)`? Just curious. :) Yeah, as Jack said, it is a bad idea to use inline forms inside an email, as also many mail providers block `
    ` tag usage inside HTML Emails.
     – Praveen Kumar Purushothaman Oct 04 '12 at 09:04
  • Very bad idea. E-mail programs are not browsers and should only display entities limited to text and images. Imagine that browsers differ in functionality and that e-mail clients are much worse, some can´t even read HTML and converts to text. Besides, many of them will view your e-mail as an phishing attempt. See: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2435/how-forms-perform-in-html-emai/ – Marcus Oct 04 '12 at 09:07

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No. I'd steer well clear of this. Campaign Monitor has a very good article on this. It goes further than just saying no. Well worth a read but here's the bottom line:

The Recommendation: Given the sporadic support for forms in emails, we recommend linking to a form on a website in an email rather than embedding it therein. This is the safest, most reliable solution to pairing an email message with a form. More people will see it and be able to use it, and as a result participation will increase.

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2435/how-forms-perform-in-html-emai/

SpaceBeers
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    Awesome recomendation @SpaceBeers, there is a nice post about that to: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18851051/embedded-google-form-in-email – Tiago Oliveira Jul 02 '14 at 18:42