We do a load of web form stuff at work, nothing clever, just allow people to create forms that email them content.

However whilst some of our scripts are pretty solid and do sensible things, allowing validation of fields from the HTML, and all sorts. I get the feeling that email just doesn't work well here. The basic failure mode that causes most pain is when the email address the form is submitted to doesn't work, closely followed by when the sender/enquirer doesn't enter their email address correctly. Similarly in these days of antispam methods it doesn't sit well in my mind to be making an email with such odd combinations of sender, recipient, and other fields. I'd suggest as much as 2 or 3% of such traffic seems to get lost.

Although it isn't a standard yet, the draft RFC 2368 is the one that allows "mailto:" links to have other fields, allowing the website to draft an email, and then asks the clients own email client to send it, which seems a neat approach for some tasks.

The drawback being "does it work with people who use webmail or people using kiosks?". The obvious drawback, that it isn't yet a standard, doesn't seem to be a problem, even Lynx has implemented it.

I think the "solution" is to store the content on the webserver, and send notification via other methods (email will do). This way if the email is bounced or trounced, the content isn't lost. We use this approach for ecommerce transactions.

Of course this doesn't solve the problem of people not getting their own email address, or other contact details correct when filling in the forms, but perhaps those people really are beyond the help of computers.

What do others do?

Firefox 1.5 has an X Forms plugin. I've seen the future, it looks burocratic, and like a very verbose programming language.