My setup for Contact Forms in Foundation 6

Email Action stack set up

Above is a screenshot of my setup. The screenshot doesn't cover the whole depth of the stack details but there is nothing significant below what you see here.

So in order:

Subject:

A website enquiry from {{name}}

This is picking up from the first field in the form which in my example is called 'name'

The double curly braces indicate a field that has been created in a form field so field names need to correspond with whatever you have in the form.

Custom Email:

This custom email set up will format an email which contains each of the fields captured in the form.

From Address:

no-reply@websitesyork.co.uk

Every email requires a valid sending email address and a receiving email address. This represents the sending email address part of the interaction and must exist as a real email address, even if no one is monitoring it.

Rather than trusting to luck I always set up a dummy email address on the client's server and I personally call it: 

no-reply@domainname.co.uk however you could use anything for the first part. It doesn't have to be no-reply. It just has to exist on the server running the website. That way you can guarantee that the web hosting company won't have an issue with the from address (some do apparently).

From Name:

{{name}}

This is the person's name as entered on the contact form.

To Address:

The address to which the email is primarily directed. You can also add cc addresses and bcc addresses later on. So in my case I have entered my email address which is martwaring@gmail.com On a client site then I would use their preferred email address.

To Name:

The name of the recipient of the email. In my case, it is Martin Waring. Again for a client, it will be the name of the client or their business.

Email on Failure fields:

Similar format as above showing where to send the failure notification notice if something breaks. Again I use martwaring@gmail.com

Reply Address:

{{email}}

In my case, I capture the viewer's email address in a field called email (otherwise you have no idea how to communicate back to them) so I populate this field with {{email}} which is the person's email that has completed the form. If they make a mistake filling that field in then there is very little you can do about it!

Reply Name:

This will add their name to the reply email, assuming that you compose one by replying to the one you receive in your email application.

CC fields

Sometimes I will populate these email addresses with my own email address so that I can confirm that the contact form is working on the client's hosting, particularly if I have just migrated a website from my own sandbox testing server to the client's hosting. I always liaise this activity to make sure that he/she is also getting the emails and after this testing is done remove myself from the CC fields so that I don't continue to receive emails addressed to my client.

Junk Mail

Junk mail was for me and my clients a fairly common problem at the time when I was building sites on Foundation 1. That is why I made the subject line of the email as meaningful as I could get it and I used an opening phrase in the custom email settings, rather than just presenting a list of the data fields captured. 

I reasoned that the more the email looked like a proper human-written email then the less likely that the junk mail algorithms would flag an email as junk. Since introducing these measures I have not had, as far as I know, any problems with F6 Contact-form generated emails going into junk, either personally or for my clients.

Obviously, I change the wording slightly on client sites to represent that the email is coming from their 'Emergency Locksmith business website' or whatever it is. 

Received Email

Here is what the received email looks like to me. If this was a real enquiry then I could reply directly to this email from my email application.

Please note that you cannot test this contact form in Rapidweaver preview. It must be published first and some hosting companies will required that the server it is on needs to be where the 'from' email address is created - hence my note about setting up a 'no-reply' email address for your domain.

Update 27th March 2025

I recently had an issue after moving a site to another hosting company whereby the Contact Form was flagging an error on submission and the JS Console was showing a 403 error. The problem is documented here.

The issue was resolved after the hosting company apologised for installing a Wordpress security rule that denied access to an important component of the Forms stack, in effect disabling it.