You can build forms with a variety of fields in them which, when completed by the user, will then email the information to you. Add a new block to a page, choose Contact Form as the block type and a form like the one below will be added to the page. You can then move it up and down the page as required like any other block.

By clicking the editing cog icon on the form block you can make a large number of changes to the form. You can add lots of form elements and choose which ones are required, for instance. This way you can change it from a simple Contact Us form to a fairly complex form requiring lots of details.

When a visitor to your site fills the form in the form information is emailed to the email address you have specified in Site Settings -> Site Emails. You can also add a CC address so that the form content is also copied to another person in your organisation.

But we have also added the functionality to set a specific form to send to a different address. Suppose you're a sports club with a general enquiries form. It sends to the site email address. But imagine you want to create a separate 'become a member' form and have it be sent to the membership secretary. You can do that - edit the form's settings and you'll find you can enter a different email address for that form.

One big problem with forms on websites is having them abused by automated spambots and human scammers. Billions of emails a day are generated by these. Whilst many will be stopped by the recipient's spam blocking systems, lots get through.

You'll be very familiar with Captcha system which in theory can't be solved by bots but can by humans. We don't use these as, aside from being irrittaing and awkward to use, they make life difficult in terms of accessibility. If you have eyesight issues, or a condition which prevents you easily using a mous, they can be almost impossible to use.

Instead we've developed our own tools to detect and block spam at source. They're not infallible, but do a pretty good job. You can make a small adjustment to how this works - if you're very worried about 'phishing' attacks being sent through your forms you can adjust the settings to block any emails being sent which contain URLs in them.

By default, any form on your site will generate an email to your chosen email address which will contain the following text along with the form submission.

DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL - it won't be received by anyone.

The emails come from the address noreply@web-cdn.org which is not monitored and if you reply, perhaps because you think you're replying to the person who made the enquiry, your reply won't be read by anyone.

However, that seems to be a shame - after all, most forms you might create on your website would ask for the enquirer's email address, so it would be a good idea if when you replied to an email from noreply@web-cdn.org that the reply would actually go to the person who made the enquiry instead.

Luckily, the folk who designed email in the first place thought of that. We can provide a 'replyTo' header to the email which tells your mail client to actually send the reply to the enquirer's email address, not to noreply@web-cdn.org.

Well, unfortunately over the years we've learned that not all email clients treat the replyTo header in the way they should. Some*, (and I'm looking at you here, Samsung phones!) don't, so even if we send the mail with a replyTo address, if you use a Samsung phone the reply will go to noreply@web-cdn.org and get lost, even though you'll believe you've replied correctly to the enquirer. This is a worse situation than us having to tell you "Do not reply to this email" because you won't understand why you're not hearing back from your customer/enquirer.

If you are certain that neither you nor anyone else who responds to contact forms on your site has a Samsung phone, then you can change the default behaviour in Dashboard -> Site Settings -> Site Emails. If you do so the words "Do not reply to this email" won't be added to the emails you receive, and the replyTo address will be added as a header.

However, note that the replyTo address will only be added to the emails you receive if a field with the name 'email_address' or 'email' exists in the form, and the enquirer has filled it in with a valid email address. By default when you create a new form it will include the field 'email_address'.

* We do also get sporadic reports that sometimes AOL webmail doesn't respect the replyTo header either, so if you use AOL for your email you should take care when replying.

There is another reason you might want to take care when switching the replyTo function on. When you reply to something most mail clients will include the whole email thread in the reply. That shouldn't be a problem - after all the person who just filled the form in already knows everything they typed into the form, so it's not as if you're potentially breaching confidentiality.

However, imagine you are Santa Claus and you have a form where a parent can ask you to send their child an email, and for this purpose they type the child's email address in rather than their own. If you now reply to the form email it will go to the child, but (unless you delete it) it will have the comments the parent made at the bottom of the email - eg "Johnny hasn't been a good boy this year so just bring him socks."

Finally, what if you have a complaints form and you thought it was funny to name the form elements "moaning_persons_name" and "moaning_persons_email" etc. Unless you delete it the recipient of your replyTo email will see these names.