Why Can't I Just Reply to Form Submissions?

If you've used the Custom Form Builder that's part of QuantumCMS then you may have asked youself, or one of our support team, this very question.

It's not uncommon to see an email from the contact (quote request, survey, etc.) form on your site and feel the urge to respond immediately. Unfortunately, just hitting the Reply button won't do the trick. You'll need to copy the email address out of the message and send your reply to that address.

We do this intentionally, even though it may seem counter-intuitive. Most spam fighting software uses many different methods to identify a piece of email it should block. One of those methods is to pay attention to email messages with the same subject and similar content but that come from different addresses. If every message from the forms on your site was coming from a different email address (the address of the person submitting it), it's just a matter of time before those messages don't make it through to you.

Instead, we force you to choose a "from" address for each form. This way you can add all messages from that address to a whitelist (a list of safe email addresses within your spam blocking software), ideally preventing them from being blocked. It also means that, should you set it to your own address or a shared address you can see, for those rare times you accidentally reply without pasting in the user's email address you should know immediately when it comes right back to you.

Some users choose different "from" addresses for different forms to ease in email filtering (sending messages to certain folders or people within your organization). While you can always lean on the email subject to do that, we understand that many of you may have a preference for using the email address.

The next time you are about to reply to a form submission from your web site, take a moment to make sure you are sending it to the right person. It's easier to glance at it once instead of having to copy and paste the entire reponse into a new message.

If you aren't familiar with the form builder that's built into QuantumCMS, please take a moment to look over the Custom Form Builder tutorial.