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Ask HN: Easiest way to set up email form?

11 points by hknmtt ↗ HN
I'd like to have a simple static website with a form that would send the filled data to my email. What would be the easiest setup to achieve this? I would like to avoid using PHP or another language and handling the e-mail myself to keep the website as simple as possible. JavaScript is incapable of doing it and it would expose credentials. So I guess I am looking for a simple mailing service..

12 comments

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thek3nger
On my website, I set up a webhook to a Zapier “send email” zap: I have a basic contact form and a button that, in practice, does a POST to the Zapier webhook with the email content.

It is not perfect, but it works for my very little volume and hides my email to the outside (I rarely get spam on the email address linked to the contact form).

tren
If you host on something like Netlify, it's pretty easy to add it as a netlify form.
tikkun
The simplest would be an Airtable or Google Form that's set to send new responses to you. You could embed the form in a static html website, or you could make the form itself act as the website.
aarobot
Although you mentioned that you wouldn't like to use JavaScript, I've found EmailJS to work fine. You can use your gmail account as the email provider. I believe the monthly request limit is 200 when using the free plan.

No credentials are exposed and you can prevent abuse with reCAPTCHA.

dimmke
I’ve struggled with this on my site too - I don’t want to custom code a solution so I’ve been using Mailchimp but Mailchimp is gross (it keeps people’s emails even if they unsubscribe)

SendGrid is cool and allows for much more flexibility with emails like custom variables, I recently rebuilt my email templates with MJML but I really wish there was just an easy service that allowed you to POST to an endpoint, supported double opt in and gave you that level of control.

After researching it became clear I was going to have to setup some kind of custom backend for my Gatsby site or use a server less function service and write the code myself.

dmje
I like tally [0]. Lovely people, great functionality. Free. No worries about any of that normal deliverability rubbish.

[0] https://tally.so/

codegeek
I have tested https://fieldgoal.io/ they seem decent.

You can also write your own using something like Cloudflare workers or an AWS Lambda function. We did that for our production website.

guidone72
I don't know if this covers completely your use case bu you can try this

https://letsform.dev

at least you can spare the boilerplate code of the front end