Smart Forms Manage Recipients

Hi, awesome work with the Smart Forms I create websites for clients and all clients have at least 1 form. That means that I can only add 5 clients to the list of recipients my suggestion is to make a way for us to buy more recipient spaces?

Thanks for starting this thread! We can increase the limit. How many recipients would you need ideally?

I would say that 20 is a good number, the demand may(hopefully) increase over time. Then I have another suggestion, maybe a place for us to enter a subject and header for the document. Linked to the recipient or form.

I personally don't see much need for more than 10 myself if they are a per project list. If it's an inert list that serves all of our projects, then we need a lot more than 20 lol. I'm assuming it's per project though? I rarely need more than 6 or 7 and that's usually to be able to send emails to specific people for specific subject topics, departmentalizing so to speak, which I don't think this form setup is cut out to do as of yet.

The problem is that when you delete a recipient the server can't authenticate the email address and the email wont send. Error : Unknown recipient We couldn't locate the email address for sending this form.

Color me confused here, but .... why would you try to send an email to someone if you've deleted them from the recipient list? The fix here would be to add the correct one and alter your form's recipient to the correct one. It's your job as a web designer to keep track of that information and that would be more so if you are using this Form setup because the recipients have to be present in the list in order to be used. In other words, if a client changes their email address, you don't just add another one into the recipient list, you change it (delete the old, add the new) in the list and in the form.

Or am I still misunderstanding that?

Let me try to explain: I currently have 10 websites , each website have a smart form and a email recipient to each website owner. Currently we are allowed 5 recipients. I can only add smart form to 5 out of 10 websites. You cant delete the recipient ( to make space for another ) as there is authentication on the email address.

Recipient email address must stay authenticated as long as you use that form.

So if you're a developer selling websites your customer email must stay authenticated forever.

It's not a good idea to use that feature ATM if you just bought the 1-year license or use the free student license because ALL forms will stop working when you license expires. Only people who bought lifetime license are entitled to use that service with no expiry date, so can sell their websites to their customers and hope that forms will keep working.

That's an additional reason why I asked for a form (with its php local modules) where we can enter own Amazon SES credentials, like we do for gmaps. Some ideas can be borrowed from https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/mail-for-good

Well I did ask this question on the BSS Version release forum announcement, but so far no answer on it that I saw. Maybe Martin will answer there or here as to whether or not the email addresses are "Total for all projects" or "Per Project". I personally think the limit should be "Per Project" and that way we will always have enough for our clients that need more than one email used per form or multiple forms on a site with different emails used for them.

@Martin: Can you clear this issue up for us and let us know how this actually works? If the OP of this post is correct and it's 5 total, that is basically a useless scenario for web builders that do this seriously and as a living.

i'd say that number should be differentiated:

-) pirates -> 0 recipients, that feature should check a legit install

-) free student version -> 1 fixed recipient with the school address used to register the free license, to be renewed yearly, like - I hope- the license.

-) 1-year license -> 3/5 recipients expiring after 1 year

-) lifetime license -> 10/20 recipients never expiring (legally I prefer 10 years license)

**) additional packages with 100 recipients with 10yrs license sold apart.

Add to that an option to drop locally a few PHP files for self-hosted form processing that can connect to own (SMTP or to) Amazon SES like https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/mail-for-good<br /> That latter option for me would be the best. Amazon SES is really cheap and that would give me complete control over all email sending process, payments, and using my own account, never to be banned or blocked or suspended if Martin has a problem or gets banned.

I don't like the idea to share the same mail-from with some unknown guy creating spammy sites and risking my customer forms get blacklisted and blocked by $someprovider. Or have to write here a support message and hope that Martin is not on holidays and fixes the issue soon. BSS is a prototyping/IDE software, not an email provider. I prefer to have things under my control.

On AWS SES I could authorize my own recipients and define how long the form will work for my customers, even receive and act on spam reports. Like for gmaps I can code a better one, but for a small website, the BSS provided module is enough. So allowing to use to my SES account and dropping a contact-us-send.php module can be good for many small projects I manage. A self-hosted option that doesn't use Martin's infrastructure.

I think all that's needed is to find some well maintained php-send library and finally let BSS create and link the submit button to a PHP file. No manual editing, no additional work, just add recipient and SES credentials, in Amazon SES authorize the recipients and upload the exported site to own server.

Ok, I can do all that manually but since a new BSS version had been dedicated to implementing better forms, and I suppose many more developing hours will be spent for that, please just include support for external SMTP or -better- AWS SES.

And, btw, the option to publish via sftp to own hosting is still missing.

1 Like

Thanks for the feedback, folks!

The recipient list is global and is associated with your license. When a recipient is removed from the list, email delivery will stop working for the forms that use it. We will bump the number of recipients to 10 and add the ability to specify a custom subject line in the next release.

There is one thing to keep in mind, though. We built Smart Forms with the intent of giving developers and companies a simple way to add working forms to their own sites. It wasn't intended to be offered as a service to clients.

The things you are suggesting – white labeling and unlimited recipients are a different type of service that we wouldn't be able to offer for free as part of your Bootstrap Studio license. There are other companies that have made this their business and offer lots of features for a reasonable fee. Smart Forms is not a replacement for them.

Ahhh ok Martin that all makes more sense now. If that's the case then 10 is more than enough for a single site or 2. Thanks for the clarification on it's usage. :)

how many emails Recipient I can add in smart form as a lifetime user

Lifetime users get 10 recipients. But, as mentioned above, you can have an unlimited number of forms that use them.

We built Smart Forms with the intent of giving developers and companies a simple way to add working forms to their own sites. It wasn’t intended to be offered as a service to clients.

I think the SmartForms are great, congratulations. I see your mail server as a developer test service, not as a permanent service to our customers - that would be wrong for lots of reasons! <g>

Is there somewhere in SmartForms that we can specify the target URL for the emails, so we can set up our own email processing scripts?

How do i set 2 Recipients in the form? I just have the option to select 1 or other... but i need to send email to 2 diferent accounts, is it possible?