submitting data from an email using an html form...?

[daverobev]

Okay,

I'm doing a mail out of a couple of hundred emails with a couple of questions in - basically market research.

I want to put the form in the email - in fact, I have done so. However, if I send the email to myself and hit submit, I get no data (like the person's record number that gets sent out via the mailer prog we use) back in my data file - except the server variables (date and time) from the asp bit.

If I preview the email in a browser and hit submit, the data gets submitted correctly (ie, the html is right). Also works fine if I check the email from a web-based email prog (ie yahoo webmail).

So basically outlook is not allowing submitting of data directly out of itsself - does this sound about right? Is there a way of getting Outlook to pass data to my submit script?

Does that make sense??

[Paul Adams]

You really, really, really don't want to be doing that.

Assuming all your users are using Outlook is bad.
Assuming an email program should be able to view and use HTML correctly is bad.
Letting users get into the habit of receiving HTML emails and simply completing them and hitting "submit" is bad.

Please just send a plain text email with a URL that the user must copy & paste into a browser to access the form on your site, then your submission problems go away.

HTML for emails was an awful idea, I wish it had never been implemented - so many phishing scams work through this, plus not all email clients can handle this format so it looks bloody awful.

[Stoo]

Yup, just use the email to inform them what they need to do and include the link to the survey, anything else is fairly bad practise.

[IBM]

Daverobev ... I'll third that. It's a bad idea, and assuming cross browser compatability for anything is anything is not good practise. Using a link and getting the user to open the page manually is the best way - you can't even guarentee the user will have their net connection open when they read their emails, they may just download and disconnect, which means they'll go through filling out the form only to find that it does nothing when they submit, which will piss them off no end. Do it the other way.

unless of course you are doing a phishing scam in which case you need to do the following ... ah, maybe not the best place to discuss this ...

[daverobev]

Hmm, okay fair enough, makes sense...but the convenience of having it all in one page without having to go to an external page was what was attracting me...using the link I guess I can pass the user data along. Just having it all in one seemed a neat idea, but I bow to your additional knowledge. Cheers chaps and/or chapesses.