Greetings! I am afraid i have another “stupid question” (im an amatuer).
On my site made in blocs (sfostergraphics.com) i’ve discovered that using a button with the navigate to url “mailto:address@place.com” apparently doesnt work in all situations. Since this is my “resume” site, i kinda need it to.
As a solution i am attempting the “form” approach. Problem is it always sends me back a error when i try it (in safari, chrome, whatever). I cant seem to figure out what i’ve done wrong. Perhaps a better explaination of what these settings are would help me?
when i click on the form in the left column, there are these settings:
type - self hosted (?)
send to - this should be my email address, right?
from - (the senders email address i guess? how do i get this?)
subject - title of the email, i assume
Greeting- ?
success - show message
fail - message
The fields are largely self explanatory. But, the from email should be set to one of your own email addresses. In most of the sites I create I simply set as webmaster@whatever domain. It only shows YOU, the recipient of the web form where your notification email has come from. Self hosted is what you will use if you wish to use the Blocs built-in script. This is the easiest option to deal with.
The send to field should be the email address where you want your form results delivered. Try to use a domain-specific email address rather than a generic one such as Gmail - some web hosts don’t like forwarding messages to email addresses outside of the domain. The greeting is an optional message line that you can use if you wish, Subject is what will appear in the subject line of your email.
If you set all this up and you still get an error message, you may have to get hold of your hosting company to ensure that they have the PHP send mail function activated on your hosting.
Also note that the form has to be hosted on your domain before the form will work, it won’t work if you preview locally on your computer.
The mailto option is a bit hit or miss because it requires the person contacting you to have an email client set up on their computer. With so many people using web-based email clients, this option will not work.
good sir! I think, or at least i though i had it beat. It now gives me the 'message is sent" (after i uploaded it)- but the actual message never arrives.
I put the form in a modal (thanks for that genius!) and it “pops up” when you hit the email button, put in a name and message and the send button seems to work. What have i done wrong? Sorry to be so clueless about what should be “simple”
As @simon says, your form doesn’t include a respondents email field which would make it very difficult for you to respond to the enquirer. However, that shouldn’t prevent the form from sending - in fact, yours appears to be sent ok. So, I think the problem may be server-side. You may have to check that your host will allow the sending of messages to your chosen email address. As I mentioned in my first post, sometimes, hosts don’t like sending to email addresses outside the domain. They may also need to see a valid From email address associated with the domain. The only way you can check these things is to get hold of your host on chat and have them check your form to see if it’s something they can fix from their end.
Or, a problem I made for myself, was inadvertently moving a form field outside of its grouping with the title.
On screen, it looked fine (maybe spacing a bit bigger than normal), but looking at the structure, it was detached from its header compared to the the other form elements.
I was getting the ‘message sent’ message, but receiving nothing also.
i discovered that the error comes no matter what you do, until you actually upload it to a server. Then, depending if they have the right settings it works! Unfortuately, i have two domains on two different servers, it works on one, not the other. oh well! However i learned a TON! Thanks all!
