

Turn mailto links into clean contact forms - cmstoken
http://www.squaresend.com/

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pilif
I don't understand why you'd even want a contact form over an email link.
People have email clients configured and they know how to use them. Their
email clients also provide much better editing features for a message than
what a standard browser-textarea would provide. Things like rich text ( _ugh_
) or auto-save or save as draft and whatnot. Mail clients also usually archive
sent messages so a sender automatically has something to reference in the
future.

Furthermore, it allows a customer to add the recipient email address to their
address book if the need for further communication arises.

On the receiving end, SPAM filtering for email has gotten so good that having
a public email address posted somewhere is a non-issue, whereas having to deal
with bots submitting contact form is still an issue in need to be solved on a
per-site basis, so just having an email link will solve the spam issue for the
recipient of the form.

So - why would you still use a contact form? I mean - if it's for a plain
contact form - the moment you want to ask for structured data or file
attachments, it might start to make sense, but even then - who doesn't hate
these forms where you have to click a radio button for selecting the purpose
of a message when just typing a subject would do too - especially when the
purpose you want isn't listed.

Personally, I always prefer a plain email link over a contact form - both as a
sender and as a recipient.

~~~
ErrantX
We had this argument where I work (with thousands of consumer and business
customers).

Some quick A/B testing and surveying indicate that "People have email clients
configured and they know how to use them" is very wrong :) With an actual
contact form we had a massive spike in pre-sales requests, with a direct spike
in new business.

This is especially prevalent for business users, who will often make a sales
contact. Anyone with a B2B site that only has a mailto: link is losing out!

As to the rest (rich text, etc.) I agree. We built our contact form to push
the (plain text) request into a mailbox & send a pleasant information email to
the customers address, which accounts for a lot of the points you raise.

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brianchu
Here's a roll-your-own alternative: use an embedded Google form and style it
to fit your website's theme. That's what I do at
[http://www.brianchu.com](http://www.brianchu.com) (Contact Me button at the
left). Works like a charm and I get an email notification every time someone
submits the form.

A contact form is superior to publicly displaying an email address because 1)
if you think about it as a conversion funnel, that's one less step for the
person to reach out to you, and 2) a contact form makes it really clear that
you're open to being contacted; some people are hesitant to email you out of
the blue.

~~~
twodayslate
You should write a tutorial on how to do this. How do you theme the form?

~~~
j_s
You can edit the HTML manually to tweak anything as desired:

[http://www.immersionmedia.com/blog/customizing-and-
styling-g...](http://www.immersionmedia.com/blog/customizing-and-styling-
google-forms/)

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huhtenberg
> _Turns mailto links into clean contact forms_

Sounds like a description of a weekend hack project on Github, but apparently
it's a _service_. Damn.

~~~
highace
Someone will get this up on github soon I'm sure.

It's actually a very good idea, but a service would have been much better
suited to a few years ago when pages were more static and adding a contact
form to a page was reasonably hard work for a designer with no programming
experience. Nowadays you pretty much get one built in to Wordpress/any
CMS/template/whatever.

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dugmartin
Very well executed. Two things I would add immediately though:

1) A WordPress plugin. I know it is just a script include but this makes it
much easier to integrate and gives you visibility on the WordPress plugin
list. You can also add an admin menu item to load your admin ui in a iframe
inside the WordPress admin.

2) An affiliate program. I can see a lot of designers recommending this to
clients and if you can give the designers a cut of ongoing monthly revenue you
will greatly increase your reach and will give you a market focus.

~~~
dugmartin
Third thing to add:

3) I'd remove the free monthly plan and just say "Free for your first 100
contact replies". This lets people try it out without having to think about
how many valid contacts they get a month and filters out paying for spam
messages. It also changes your conversion point from a monthly trigger to a
single one so you can do lifecycle emails as they start getting close to their
limit.

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minhajuddin
There is already [http://getsimpleform.com/](http://getsimpleform.com/) for
this. Ironically, its the most popular thing I've built with a fraction of
time I spent on other projects like
[https://substancehq.com/](https://substancehq.com/) .

~~~
twodayslate
How are you going to monetize getsimpleform? I like it.

~~~
minhajuddin
I don't plan on monetizing it, I just wanted something simple for a few
websites I maintain, it runs at virtually no cost.

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stef25
This is amazingly useful. Every site I work on needs a contact form but it has
to be styled, validated with JS and on the backend and then configured to be
sent to my customer. I can do this all with my eyes closed, but it still takes
time. Can't wait to use this.

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FajitaNachos
I'm using this on a couple projects and it's pretty slick. Much like the title
says, your mailto links become a nice little contact form. Haven't had any
problems with it so far.

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matthewbaker
I really like this. A couple of random ideas:

* Test integrations with various CRM type systems. Hubspot, Salesforce, Mailchimp all have huge ecosystems that you can leverage!

* Offer per page configuration (on/off)

* Expose CSS for easy skinning. This could be a text box on your portal.

* Offer configurable fields to be collected

* Implement a "send to your webmaster" button.

* Expose that you are a whitelisted sender (if you are)

Good luck!

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CookWithMe
Nice!

For us, one use-case for contact forms is to request a webinar at a specific
date. I'm guessing here, but I think more people will request a webinar if
they can simply select a date and send it off vs. if they have to write a
free-form email requesting a date.

Any plans on adding a date-picker (instead / in addition to the main message)?
I was going to implement that myself at the end of this week/next week...

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aiiane
Something important that seems to be missing from the website's available
information: what happens when you hit the limit on free messages but haven't
paid?

It seems like there's two possibilities with any likelihood, either it gives
the user an error or it starts behaving like a regular mailto: link until the
limit rolls over - but it'd be nice if the site said which.

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szc
Do these links work with the Baidu spiders?

Baidu doesn't seem to understand that an href to a mailto: is in an email not
html namespace!

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gerhardi
Before I saw this, I couldn't imagine email messages through a form to be more
expensive than SMS messages.

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nayefc
Why would I pay for this when it's just 5 extra lines of HTML code for the
modal dialog?

~~~
l0gicpath
Then don't pay for it. Add those 5 extra lines of HTML code for the modal
dialog.

Then build some administrative area to view these messages that get sent
through your 5-extra-lines-contact-form.

Or build some simple(or not, depends on your needs) backend logic to mail the
content of the form to your inbox in that case you might want to

\- integrate with some SMTP-relay/Mail-server-api like Mailgun, Postmark,
Mandrill or any other to insure delivery and what not.

\- Or you could host your own mail server.

\- Or authenticate with an account @gmail or any other and mail it through
their SMTP server.

But really though, I am pretty sure it's geared more towards those with less
technical experience than you and I or those with little time on hand to do
anything more decent than putting a mailto link.

