Turn mailto links into clean contact forms

http://www.squaresend.com/

by cmstoken • 13 years ago

53 32 13 years ago

squaresend.com

szc• 13 years ago

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!

FajitaNachos• 13 years ago

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.

CookWithMe• 13 years ago

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...

pilif• 13 years ago

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.

girzel• 13 years ago

Not everyone's spam filters are that good! Being able to run contact form submissions through akismet is pretty nice.

cmstoken• 13 years ago

Actually the email link is displayed above the contact form and is clickable. When I click it, it opens my default mail client. I think the point is to let the savvy users use their (already set up) mail client and everyone else who hasn't set one up (i.e. browsing from library etc...) use the contact form. Best of both worlds for site owners.

danielrhodes• 13 years ago

Four reasons why they are useful:

1) Not as many people as you think have configured email clients 2) Filling out a form does not break flow with looking at the site 3) Response rates are higher for these forms than an email address (based on my own experience) 4) a form allows you to collect more structured information from responders

adrianhoward• 13 years ago

I don't understand why you'd even want a contact form over an email link

Because:

* Some folk don't have email addresses and still want to contact you (it does happen)

* Some folk are using this away from their primary machine and don't have email configured

* The form's are large in-your-face pieces UI and are much more "obvious" than an email address. In multiple usability / split tests I've seen feedback forms get more responses than email addresses. People often completely miss the fact that their is an email address. They're looking for a form.

* A large chunk of people just seem to prefer them - again I've seen this in multiple usability tests.

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

Me to. But I'm generally not building web sites for me ;-)

frio• 13 years ago

Between my work computer, home computer, laptop and phone, I don't have a consistent mail experience. Some open my gmail account, some my other personal account, some my work account -- and some, nothing at all (depending on which browser I'm using).

I'd much, much, much prefer a form over a mailto: link, which 90% of the time loads completely the wrong thing.

dchest• 13 years ago

Simple: everyone out there uses Yahoo Mail, and when they click on a mailto: link, it opens Outlook or something, which asks them to configure account, so they close it and then go to their Yahoo Mail and type the address.

(This will happen until everyone clicks Yes to registerProtocolHandler requests.)

untog• 13 years ago

On top of the reasons others have given, forms allow you to create structured feedback with specific questions. What OS are you using? What is your account number? etc. etc.

You can hope that people will include all the relevant details in an e-mail, but I'll bet you most don't.

StavrosK• 13 years ago

This is exactly the feedback I gave them a few months ago, when this was on the front page again. I just saw the demo and saw that they feature a clickable mailto link with the email address at the top of the form, so it's all moot.

Whoever likes using their email client can click the link. Whoever wants to use the form can do that.

ErrantX• 13 years ago

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.

alexk7• 13 years ago

I think the last time I configured an email program was 10 years ago. Clicking a mailto link bring a window to configure an email program (that comes with the OS) that I never launched otherwise.

tomasien• 13 years ago

I don't know how to configure my email client. I could Google it, but until the first time this appeared on Hacker News, I didn't even think that that was an option for web based Gmail (which is what I use). Even after finding that out, I still haven't configured it, because I just hate mailto: links.

And I'm a fucking programmer.

brianchu• 13 years ago

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 (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.

twodayslate2• 13 years ago

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

j_s• 13 years ago

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

http://www.immersionmedia.com/blog/customizing-and-styling-g...

huhtenberg• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

stef25• 13 years ago

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.

gerhardi• 13 years ago

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

dugmartin2• 13 years ago

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.

dugmartin2• 13 years ago

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.

minhajuddin2• 13 years ago

There is already 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/ .

twodayslate2• 13 years ago

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

minhajuddin2• 13 years ago

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

aytekin• 13 years ago

We also have something similar called Jotform Instant. Creating a live form takes like 30 seconds.

1. Pick a form from 3000+ form templates

2. Enter email address to receive responses

3. Copy the code provided to your site

http://instant.jotform.com

nayefc• 13 years ago

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

l0gicpath• 13 years ago

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.

matthewbaker• 13 years ago

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!

aiiane• 13 years ago

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.

Turn mailto links into clean contact forms

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