ChronoForms 3.1 for Joomla! site Cookbook: 80 recipes for building attractive and interactive Joomla! forms

One of the two main things that forms "do" when they are submitted, is to send e-mails. We saw in Chapter 1, Creating a Simple Form how to send an e-mail, including values from the form, to a site administrator.

In this chapter, we'll learn more about this and look at different ways of sending e-mails from your ChronoForms forms.

Sending an e-mail to the site administrator is great, until he decides to reply. Then we have a problem. When you click Reply, the e-mail that opens is addressed to the site administrator (actually, we set it to info@example.com if you recall). So, he sends the e-mail to himself, and not to the person who submitted the form.

Yet their e-mail is right there in the e-mail text. Can't we put that in the From Email field? Then the reply will go just where we want it.

Well, yes we could put the e-mail in there (technically using a Dynamic From Email field). But then we find that the administrator no longer receives any e-mails at all!

This is most likely because the site ISP is checking for spammers and one of the checks that they run is to compare the site domain with the domain in the From Email header of the e-mail. If they don't match, the e-mail is marked as "likely spam" and dropped in the bin.

The answer is to use the Reply To Name and Reply To Email headers.

We've seen how easy it is to set ChronoForms up to send e-mails in response to a form submission. The difficult part is to make sure that your e-mails are delivered safely. Here are four checks to ensure safe delivery.

We've already sent e-mails to the administrator with the form information in it. Sometimes you also want to thank the form submitter too. These e-mails seem to fall into two broad groups — confirming the details on the submitted form, and simpler messages that say "thanks" with maybe a little extra info.

ChronoForms will do either (or a combination) quite happily. Here you are going to see how to create an e-mail from the second group.

You don't always want to send the e-mail to the site administrator. Sometimes you want to send it to different people depending on the information in the form. One example might be customer support where some queries are technical, some are sales related, and some are about billing queries.

We'll create a form that uses a set of radio buttons to choose a department to receive the e-mail. One easy way to do this is to put the e-mail addresses in the form code but we really, really don't want them to appear anywhere on the website (even if they aren't visible to human readers, the bots will find them). So we'll also add code to look up the correct e-mail address after the form is submitted and use that in the e-mail that is sent.

We'll be seeing later on in Chapter 8, Uploading Files from your Forms how to add file inputs to your forms and handle the files after the form is submitted. Here we are going to anticipate that and look at how to add an uploaded file to an e-mail.

In the preceding recipe, we saw how to attach a file uploaded by the user, here we'll look at the similar task of attaching a file to an e-mail sent to the user. This time the file is not uploaded but is in a folder on the server somewhere.

Very often these are "terms and conditions" that you want to send out but we'll stay with the Newsletter theme and assume that we have a sample newsletter in a PDF file.

Here's one more "hijacking" example to end this chapter. ChronoForms gives you two choices for your e-mail subject — either a fixed phrase using the "subject" element in the Email Setup, or a value returned from the form using the "dynamic subject" element.

It's a frequent request to have a subject line that's a bit of each — a fixed text with a variable element. We can do this with another code snippet in the OnSubmit Before box.