Question

I am developing a site in Visualforce and would like to offer user a simple form to send me feedback via email. There would be 3-4 fields like name, user’s email, reason and feedback and “send” button. Clicking the send button should automatically send that message to my email address.

I do not want to store the form data in salesforce at least for now…All the stuff I found online about visualforce/apex and email is about saving that data to salesforce too.

Can I just make use of apex’s email capabilities and send out email without storing that data anywhere in salesforce?

Thanks,
Calvin

Answer 1

It’s not required to insert/update/delete any records in the database when executing an action on a VisualForce page. You can leverage the Outbound Email functionality to send out your notification. For something like this, you will probably want to familiarize yourself with the SingleEmailMessage methods.

A simple example to get you going:

public PageReference actionSend() {
    String[] recipients = new String[]{'[e-mail]'};
    Messaging.reserveSingleEmailCapacity(recipients.size());
    Messaging.SingleEmailMessage msg = new Messaging.SingleEmailMessage();
    msg.setToAddresses(recipients);
    msg.setSubject('Test Email Subject');
    msg.setHtmlBody('Test body including HTML markup');
    msg.setPlainTextBody('Test body excluding HTML markup');
    msg.setSaveAsActivity(false);
    msg.setUseSignature(false);
    Messaging.sendEmail(new Messaging.SingleEmailMessage[] {msg}, false);
    return null;
}

If you are interested in sending these outbound messages from a dedicated email address (something like [e-mail]), you can set these up through the Setup -> Administration Setup -> Email Administration -> Organization-Wide Addresses menu. Once you have created an org-wide address, grab the Id from the URL and use the setOrgWideEmailAddressId(Id) method on your instance of Messaging.SingleEmailMessage.