Frequently Asked Questions

This advice applies to any Web forms...does your forms management tool take care of all this for you?

I just use a link to my email address. What's wrong with that?
Many things! The "mailto" HTML tag does not let you design your own form fields for organizing your customer data. And, email messages get lost or destroyed, are often ignored, and are difficult to reference and extract valuable information from later. Collector stores your customized client data in a relational database for easy access and integration with products like eMMa, our eMail Marketing assistant. And it sends email messages to multiple recipients so that you can monitor forms activity.
We have also discovered many resources in our research that expose limitation and vulnerability in both "mailto" and "formMail," including this interesting article: The Mailto Myth.

My ISP provides me with a form handling program (formmail.pl or it's equivalent)...isn't that enough?
Not if you want to make the Web work for you! CGI programs suh as formmail.pl easily apply to any form, but suffer from not creating any permanent, easily referenced database. Lost email is gone for good! And just try to go through each message extracting email addresses for your lists! You will quickly realize why Collector is the professional's tool of choice!

What is SmartForms?
SmartForms technology is an expert system for applying rules to form data. Using our technology you can "clean" data on the way in, guaranteeing the highest quality of data possible!