A New Spam-Free, Secure Email Form to Use with TypePad: TypePad Hacks

I'm gonna ramble a second here, but rest assured that there is actual substance to this post a couple paragraphs down. You can skip ahead if you want, but the people I talked to today were so cool that I want to tell the story first.

July and August were insanely busy months for me in the studio this year… Although I've been reading all the comments and email from my blogs, I've not been able to respond to many of them. Art is a fairly seasonal business, and when the work piles up you pretty much have to jump on it. Which has meant a lot of 20 hour workdays over the past couple months. So it's with a bit of irony, and a healthy dose of apologies that I return to the blog with a post designed to test a secure email service that I hope will work well with TypePad. I'm going to be converting my HTML site to a TypePad blog soon, and the only reason I've held off this long was because my current site host provides the secure email form that I use to avoid spam.

So although I should be putting together a bid on some ironwork right now, I've spent the day researching third party solutions for secure, spam-free email forms that host the script on their own servers so they can be used with TypePad. After a lot of googling, I found freedback and response-o-matic, both services provided by the very cool folks at Wondermill. Go check out their staff bios… They're fun.

In the past, I've had some bad experiences with free forms online (notably with Bravenet, who sent me so much unsolicited email that I had to blacklist them in my spam filter… not what I was looking for in terms of a "spam-free" email service). As a result, I'm wary about who I trust my email address to. More importantly, I'm extremely careful about whose services I use when my readers are supplying an email address! It takes more than a simple privacy policy to engage my trust… I need to talk with the people at the company personally and get a feel for exactly what they do and how.

So I called 1-800-583-6455 this afternoon. I was given the option of pressing one to talk with "a real live person," or pressing two to hear Abbott and Costello's "who's on First" skit. Heh. I pressed one and after a single ring was connected with Barb Ward (aka the Red Smartie) at Wondermill. I explained what I was looking for, what my concerns were, etc. and we had a pretty nice conversation about email, security, blogging and so on. Everything she told me fit nicely within my ideas of what was required in terms of ethics and secure code. She fowarded my contact info on to Aaron Dragushan, who called shortly thereafter.

Aaron is in Hawaii right now where his wife has a new job as an astronomer (As a Scorpio, I wonder if I should have brought up the whole downgrading of Pluto's status as a planet? Nah. Ever since they took my planet away, things have been going so well that I am forced to believe that my destiny is no longer in the hands of the stars… I seem to be getting basically everything I want lately. It's almost scary). Anyway, we chatted for a very pleasant half hour or so about email, blogs, spam, code, art, the beauty of being able to run web based businesses from anywhere and so on. Aaron has some pretty cool ideas about where he'd like to take the company in the future (javascript, ajax, 24-hour support, etc), and I'm really glad I found them. I'll definitely be paying attention to future services they offer.

I've connected Aaron up with Michael at TypePad and I hope that they're able to create a widget together for TypePad. If nothing else, I'm quite certain that they'll get along and have a fun talk.

Even if a Widget doesn't appear, you can still sign up for a free or paid account at either freedback or response-o-matic and get a form like the one below today. Just set up your form, copy the code and paste it into an entry on your blog. The design wizard makes the whole process dead simple. Although I went with a very minimal approach below, you can also include multiple choice questions; single choice questions with radio buttons or drop down menu choices; User Agreement checkboxes; or a file upload field (with paid accounts). Paid accounts also allow you to generate an autoresponder for emails as well as other features.

The services at freedback and response-o-matic are basically identical as near as I can tell. Both are easy to set up and if you do run into any issues, I can totally vouch for their tech support team. The free version has a more limited feature set and requires an unobtrusive link at the bottom. All versions are secure for both you and your readers.

The only thing I might wish for that isn't included in the form generator is a little more control over the appearance of the form, but on the other hand… if you're going to go with a set look, I think the simple approach they've taken is best. You can always go in and change appearances in the HTML if you need to.

If you've got a moment, drop me a line via the form below so I can test it out. I'll edit this post in a day or two to report how well the form functions.

Update: I just tried it out myself and it seems to be perfect! Both the email message and the autoresponder message came through in less than a minute and the email message also includes a referrer link to let me know which page of my site the email was sent from. Woo Hoo! I am so geeked to be able to scrap my old website and convert it to a blog now!