Automated contact form submission

[Stuart26]

Hi,

Can anyone recommend an automated service or tool that will submit web forms? We're basically looking for our personal spam-bot so we can have piece of mind that our contact forms are up and running.

It recently came to light that one of our contact forms got blocked by our e-mail spam provider and it had a significant impact on our customer service and enquiries that we received through the site. If we had something that submits our contact forms every few hours, we would know that they are working fine.

Thanks,

Stuart

[William.Lau]

I've had experiences with Wufoo(owned by SurveyMonkey) and they are pretty good at doing forms and can do a variety of things like accepting payments.

But it seems you just want an automated contact form, which majority of times are sent from your very own server. Have you ever considered changing your IP address, so that your emails are not being marked as spam? If you're on a shared IP, that could be the reason why your email submissions are being marked as spam.

Another option would be to alter your email settings where the contact form has a static title, that you can always make sure it is not marked as spam.

[Stuart26]

Thanks for the recommendation and the quick response but I'm not sure Wufoo will solve our problem.

As for the e-mail spam issue. The spam block is not the only point that could fail. A missing form submission every few hours could potentially highlight a problem on the web server right through to a problem on the exchange (albeit, we would know about the exchange issue quite quickly!).

[ThompsonPaul]

You can actually accomplish exactly this with a special feature of Pingdom's Uptime Tracker, Stuart. When you set up an Uptime Check for your form page, you can designate the check as a Transaction Monitor. You then use the excellent little editor wizard to create a multi-step process that will automatically fill in the fields of your form with your designated text, and then trigger the submission of the form. (Hint: use a unique email address or content submission to make downstream filtering of the submitted form and email notification easier).

You can do this kind of tracking for 1 URL/form with the free account, or you could monitor several forms with the paid accounts (about $120 for up to 10 URLs). Downside is, the slowest you can set up the monitor is for once every hour, so you'll be getting a lot of emails You'll want to set up some automated email management to handle this.

The upside is, you can be immediately notified by Pingdom alerts (email, SMS) if the web form is failing for any reason. You'll need to set up your own monitoring of the downstream email delivery process though to catch issues like spam blocking. (Though surely you've got a whitelist entry in place on the spam filter to ensure those form submissions get through?) In addition, if you wish, you can also set up a check that monitors an IMAP email server as well to know within a minute whether your Exchange server ins't responding correctly.

Lastly, if you're using Google Analytics event tracking on that form submission, you'll need to apply an IP address filter for Pingdom's IP addresses to the Analytics profile to keep the form testing from totally screwing with your Events data.

Does that sound like what you're looking for?

Paul

P.S. Have never tried this with a captcha-protected form - no idea how you'd handle that.