Send Contact Form Submissions to a Mailbox

It's easy to keep track of contact form submissions by directing those entries right to your Help Scout mailbox. This article talks about sending contact form submissions to Help Scout.

Form Applications

While it is possible to create a conversation using the Help Scout API, sending a form submission email is the more common approach. If you aren't comfortable building the contact form on your own (light programming required), we highly recommend one of these great services:

• Wufoo
• Gravity Forms (WordPress)
• Feedbackify

Sending Submissions to Help Scout

If your form is set to email submissions to your own email address that is set to forward to Help Scout, those emails will appear in Help Scout just like any other emails. 

You can circumvent forwarding delays by sending submissions directly to your Help Scout Mailbox Address if you do not need a copy saved at your email provider. Instead of emailing submissions to your connected email (support@yourdomain.com), send them directly to your Help Scout Mailbox Address. You'll see those contact form submissions pop-up in Help Scout almost immediately.

Best Practices

Make sure the From: address and Reply-to: address values are set appropriately:

1. Set the From address to something like contact@yourdomain.com or no-reply@yourdomain.com. If the From: address is set to the customer's email (spock@gmail.com), the message might be marked as spam since it's not really being sent from Gmail.
2. Set the Reply-to: address as the customer's email address. We'll pull in this address and link everything to the correct profile. When you reply, you'll be sending your message back to the customer and not contact@yourdomain.com or no-reply@yourdomain.com.

Form Submissions and Spam

Most forms that exist on the internet will get spammed sooner or later. Because the emails that your form service will generate are not just regular emails, Help Scout's spam filter will often not recognize the spammy form submissions as spam. Modern form services all offer security features that will prevent spam submissions to your form - if you find that you are receiving many emails from your form service that have spammy content, check with your service provider about ways to stop those submissions. If you have built your own form using the API, we'd recommend your developers look into adding a CAPTCHA to stop automated spam submissions to your form.