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A Simple Mail Form in Macromedia Dreamweaver 

If you need to get some kind of input back from your visitors and you aren't too concerned about security, this tip may be perfect for you. It describes how to use mailto: to send form data to a specific e-mail address. Keep in mind that the method described here is easy to implement but extremely unsecure: do not have users send you sensitive information this way. For a more secure method, look into CGI scripts.

  • Make a form (Insert > Form) and put some form objects into it. It is a good idea to organize them in a table, but make sure the table is within the form, not the other way around (Netscape will choke on forms inside of tables). Make sure one of your form objects is a submit button (Insert > Form Objects > Button).
     
  • Name your form objects. Whatever name you pick will be the heading for that entry in the e-mail that gets sent, so pick something that makes sense to the person on the receiving end, like 'Name' or 'TelephoneNumber'. Don't use spaces or special characters (except for the underscore) and remember the first character must be a letter.
     
  • Go to Edit > Preferences > Html Encoding and make sure 'Encode <,>, &, and " in Attribute Values using &' is not checked. This will allow us to enter quotes into the property inspector without converting them to the equivalent html code.
     
  • Select the form tag by clicking on the red dashed lines which represent it, and enter the following into the property inspector's 'Action' field, where user@domain.com is the address you want the data sent to:

    mailto:user@domain.com enctype="text/plain"
     
  • If you want the e-mail you receive to have a specified subject line (for example 'Hello there'), you can type instead:

    mailto:user@domain.com?subject=Hello there enctype="text/plain"

Your form is now complete. When a user fills out information and clicks Submit, an e-mail will be sent to you with that user's entries.