Using e-mail to send form data

In rare cases, it may not be possible to set up a form to send form data (although even
most free web hosts tend to provide users with some kind of form functionality, even if it’s
a shared script that doesn’t allow a great deal of customization). If you find yourself in this
sticky situation, it’s possible to use a mailto: URL for the form’s action attribute value.
This causes browsers to e-mail the form parameters and values to the specified address.
<form method="post" action="mailto:anemailaddress@somewhere.com"
å enctype="text/plain">
This might seem a simpler method than messing around with CGI scripts, but it has major
shortfalls:
Some browsers don’t support mailto: as a form action.
The resulting data may arrive in a barely readable (or unreadable) format, and you
have no control over this.
This method isn’t secure.
The user won’t be redirected and may therefore not realize data has been sent.
That last problem can be worked around by adding a JavaScript alert to the form start tag:
<form method="post" action="mailto:anemailaddress@somewhere.com"
å enctype="text/plain" onsubmit="window.alert('This form is being
å sent by email. Thank you for contacting us.')">
Of course, this relies on JavaScript being active on the user’s browser—but, then again, this
is a last resort.