Submit button in InDesign form not working

[Alma Strutt]

A client of mine has created a form in InDesign CC 2017. When the submit button is clicked this is the message they receive.

I can't see an issue with the button, it has the action 'submit form' with the correct mailto:email@address.com

Any light on this would be great thanks!

[Derek Cross]

Is the button working with your copy of Acrobat Reader?

Which Acrobat PDF reader is the the customer using?

[Alma Strutt]

No Derek it's not working with Reader. I've tried it on both Mac and PC with Acrobat Reader DC, but I know the client has tried it on older versions too.

[JonathanArias]

is this the one file this is happening with. have you tried different files? copy a submit button from a different document and paste it into that one and test too.

[Alma Strutt]

I've tried a simple form and the same error is happening.

See screen shot.

[Alma Strutt]

I think it must be something very simple so was hoping someone had experienced the same message at some point and could direct me.

[Zaid Al Hilali]

Just to verify that Submit button have the right action, open your resulting pdf in Acrobat Pro, click on Prepare Form in the Tools workspace to switch to the form editing environment, then check Submit button properties, you may remove existing submit form action then add Submit Form right from Acrobat.

[Alma Strutt]

Zaid - this is a screen shot of the message with a button I've created in Acrobat to test to see if it is an InDesign issue. I'm getting the same error.

I've also included this screen shot to show the properties of the button in case I'm doing something silly here.

Could it be something to do with how mail is configured on your machine? This would be a big issue as we won't have control over how each user has mail on their computer set up.

[BobLevine]

Remove the "mailto:" and just leave the email address.

[John Mensinger]

When I do it, the mailto: is required.

How is email function app-associated on your system? For example. I'm running a Windows (7) machine with MS Office installed which includes Outlook. So, when I click on a live email link, an OS-level registry association calls Outlook to put up a new email message with the clicked address in the To: field. (And that's what happens when I setup a Submit button with a 'mailto:' url, because the button-action response is also dependent on that OS-level association.)

The "error while uploading" message, along with the 'bcinternet.com' domain, suggest to me that in your system, email and email file attachment might not be "local" operations, but rather a web-mail/server-connect proposition, and Acrobat could be stumbling over the absence of local association.

[John Mensinger]

^Right. The error message you're seeing may actually indicate that the button action itself is working (to the extent that it can), but your default email client settings can't be resolved. What's your default email client?

[BobLevine]

Should we move this over to the Acrobat forum?

[Barb Binder]

I'd vote yes to move it here: PDF Forms.

[BobLevine]

Me, too.

The measure is passed!

[Barb Binder]

Hi Alma:

I'm guessing John is on to something. I have a local email client installed (not webmail) and the same setup works as intended.

P.S. If I remove the mailto: in front of the email address, it tries to find a file on my drive, so yes, keep that in.

[Alma Strutt]

Thank you all - it is definitely an issue with how mail is configured on the machine. Local email works fine but webmail doesn't. This has solved the issue with this job but surely there must be a better solution as how can we know a persons mail set up when we send out a form and expect it to be returned using the submit button?

Anyone got any solutions for that?

Thanks again

[Barb Binder]

Configuring the submit button to use mailto: is a quick and free option. The professional solution is to set the submit button to send the data to a script that will send a thank you note to the sender, and forward the data collected on for processing.

That said, if they are filling out the form in a browser, this may help—but I don't know:

https://www.chainsawonatireswing.com/2015/05/03/a-guide-to-getting-webmail-services-to-work-with-mai...

[Alma Strutt]

The form was originally set to mailto:etc@etc.com but if the machine has web mail as a default it gets an error message.

Thank you Barb for the link. I will give it my attention and hopefully I can offer the client a solution.