[thelist] A form in an HTML email?

[Rick den Haan]

Tris wrote:
> Can we have a box and submit button that talks to a web page?
> Clearly we'll have a link to a page with teh form on also, but this
> might encourage users to fill out the form...

Tris,

It might be possible, but even if it is, I'm sure the e-mail client will
flag your message as spam. Outlook 2007, since it uses the Word 2007 engine,
apparently does not[1] support the <form>, <input> or <textarea> tags, which
you'd need for this.  Outlook 2000 and 2003 do, but they are rumored to
delete the *message* if you try to correct a typo using the Del button.

Of course, if it's just a textarea you need for comments, you might as well
put a mailto: link in the message and fill in the To: and Subject: field
automatically.  Since the user is already in their mail client reading the
message, this might even be preferred.  Webmail clients might even take over
the mailto: links and replace them with their own compose-links.  I think
GMail does that, the webmail my hosting provider uses does as well.

HTH,
Rick.

[1]: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338201.aspx  (quite a long
way down, a bullet list under the heading "Unsupported HTML Elements
Compared with the HTML 4.01 Specification")