How to send information submitted in html to email

Question

I am making a website and I want one of the pages to have a form where they write their contact information and then have it sent to me when they press the submit button. I tried doing it in HTML by using this code

<form action="MAILTO:XXXXX@XXX.com" method="post" enctype="text/plain">

And then I have the form entries and a submit button. I enter some random details but it never sends me an email.

Here's my form entries if it means anything

Name:<br>
<input type="text" name="name" value="your name"><br>
E-mail:<br>
<input type="text" name="mail" value="your email"><br>
Comment:<br>
<input type="text" name="comment" value="your comment" size="50"><br><br>
<input type="submit" value="Send">
<input type="reset" value="Reset">

</form>

You'll need a server side language to send an email .... only HTML can do nothing about this.... or you need to use an external service where you use their API to send an email via their service.. — Mr. Alien, Apr 19 '15 at 14:59
Check this answer http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8239782/how-to-create-an-email-form-that-can-send-email-using-html — Alessandro Incarnati, Apr 19 '15 at 15:01
`mailto` asks the browser to send an email. It needs to know the email program outlook/thunderbird ets. If that has not been configured the form will fail — Ed Heal, Apr 19 '15 at 15:01
@EdHeal who is talking about `mailto:` ? He wants to send an email via HTML which is not possible.. — Mr. Alien, Apr 19 '15 at 15:02
@EdHeal I think he is mixing up the anchor tag `mailto:` with the `action` attribute — Mr. Alien, Apr 19 '15 at 15:04
@Mr.Alien - We are second guessing the action. A mailto action is valid — Ed Heal, Apr 19 '15 at 15:05
Here is already replied similar question [How to send an email using PHP?][1] [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5335273/how-to-send-an-email-using-php — Javid, Apr 19 '15 at 15:07

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 19 '15 at 15:14

As others stated in comments above, you're mixing up 2 things. You have 2 options going forward.

Option 1 is using a server-side language like PHP to send the e-mail. This is a bit harder to do, but it allows you to have a form on your page like you describe in your question. In this case, you'd have to change the action attribute of the <form> to the path to the (PHP) page/file that will process the POST request. Here's a tutorial on how to send e-mail in PHP.
Option 2 is to get rid of the form and replace it with a link that will boot the user to his e-mail program with the To: field already filled out. Obviously, this will only work if the user has a local e-mail program set up. It's usually not compatible with webmail (like Gmail, Outlook.com...). However, it can be implemented in a single line of code:

Should you opt for option 2, you can just replace the <form> element with the following code snippet, which will produce the link:

<a href="mailto:your-address@example.com">your-address@example.com</a>

Note that in the snippet above, I repeated the e-mail address as the text of the <a> tag. This ensures that people who use webmail can copy-paste the e-mail address in the web app.

How to send information submitted in html to email

1 Answers1