Adding a email button to a pdf form

Question

Hi, I have created a PDF from via indesign and edited it within Acrobat 9 adding a series of form fields. I wanted to add a "Submit" button to this form so that once the end user has completed this form it can be sent and attached to an e-mail address. I have come across many ways of being able to do this and these all seem to work fine on my home computer which is running Acrobat 8 but when I am using my work computer which is running Acrobat 9 and try to click the "Submit" button I have created which is linked to a required e-mail address, it prompts me to select an e-mail client of either being a desktop application or Internet mail. Once I have picked "Desktop E-mail Application" and clicked "ok" Acrobat then pops up with an error message reading "An error occurred while trying to create a mail document.  Acrobat is unable to complete your request."
I seem to find this very odd as I complete these exact same steps on my home computer and everything seems to work fine.
Any help on this matter would be greatly appreciated
cheers
Paul

Answer 1

In windows, the e-mail issue is typically either a limitation of the e-mail client or of the setup in windows, not Acrobat. Depending on windows to properly handle e-mail is a joke as you say. That has been true ever since HTML forms were introduced and mailto: became popular. It is extremely dependent on the client machine setup. In the past, Acrobat depended on MAPI to interface with the mail client. There are multiple versions of MAPI, even from MS and none is very reliable. I suspect that the issues you are having are similar to these MAPI issues. It is not that Adobe might not have been able to do a better just, but a lot of the Blame goes to the king of operating systems that is terrible with giving develpers proper information about how to do anything. At least they give info, apparently the MAC folks don't say anything from what I have heard -- of course, I really don't have a good source about that aspect.
My point is that generally Acrobat can handle the clients as long as the clients and OS have been properly set up, much in the way that MS tells you to do it. However, many clients do not do this well. I have some of my machines that can not handle mailto: from Acrobat, and others that do just fine. In almost all cases it is a client and OS system problem, not an Acrobat problem. I do understand the frustration, but there is more to it that just Adobe.