How can I add pulldowns and checkboxes in a MS Outlook email?

Question

I want to create a small survey in an email message. The user are to respond using free form text boxes, check boxes , or pre-defined drop downlist . I see applications that claim to be able to do that. my needs are not that elaborate. Just a few questions that need to be asked

Answer 1

Cant you use HTML to make it work?

Answer 2

In Outlook 2007 there is functionality to create polls (Voting) which may satisfy your needs:

This feature requires you to use a Microsoft Exchange Server 2000, Exchange Server 2003, or Exchange Server 2007 account.

A demonstration is provided here.

Answer 3

You can create a custom form within outlook that contains the controls you want. Use that form when creating a new email message. That will work.

Answer 4

You can simply include this as a normal HTML form in a mime part. See http://abiglime.com/webmaster/articles/cgi/010698.htm for how to do that.

However, many email clients will not display this. For example, in Thunderbird, there are settings for displaying message: "Original HTML", "Simple HTML", "Plain text". It will only display a form if it is set to "Original HTML".

Additionally, you may get security warnings from some email clients when trying to do the actual post from your email message over to the web site (I'm not sure about that as I've never tried).

I can see the appeal of making a survey easy to use in an email, but you should at least provide alternate links to access the survey on a website for users that can't see the form. And be sure to test this using a wide variety of email clients, eg: Thunderbird, Outlook, Outlook Express, Gmail, Yahoo, MSN/Hotmail,...