Contact

A basic node server for sending email forms.

Contact is a super basic Node.js application that enables you to send email forms with minimal configuration. All form configuration is done in your HTML.

<form method="post" action="http://example.com/contact@example.com">
	<input type="hidden" name="_subject" value="This is a test form" />
	<input type="email" name="_from" />
	<input type="text" name="first_name" />
	<input type="text" name="last_name" />
	<textarea name="comments"></textarea>
	<input type="submit" name="Submit" />
</form>

This project is, in some way, a clone of an excellent free service: Formspree.io. Although Formspree is outstanding, it might not be the best option for everyone; 2 key factors drove me to create this clone:

1. Setup (and maintenance) should be minimal. Formspree is opensource, and its code is on GitHub, but the setup process is way more than a trivial task, not to mention the requirements. Requirement 1 not met.

2. Should allow me to send attachments. Formspree does not allow you to send email forms with attachments (at least not at the time when this written). Requirement 2 not met.

Requirements

• Node.js v6.0.0 or greater.
• A Mailgun account.

Installation

Clone this repo on your server or download the zip file.

Once you have the code, run npm install --production to download and install all the project dependencies required to run this project.

Next step, configure your server. Open config/config.json which should look like this:

{
	"emails": [],
	"mailgun": {
		"url": "",
		"key": ""
	}
}

And update the values to match your preferences:

• emails is an array of email addresses. These emails are the ONLY emails this server will be allowed to send emails to (authorized emails)
• mailgun.url your Mailgun API URL
• mailgun.key you Mailgun Domain API Key

An example of a config.json file:

{
	"emails": ["sales@example.com", "contact@example.com", "support@example.com"],
	"mailgun": {
		"url": "https://api.mailgun.net/v3/example.com/messages",
		"key": "key-l0r3m1p5umd0l0r5174m37c0n53c737u"
	}
}

Contact uses NODE_ENV environment variable for loading its JSON configuration files, this allows you to override the above settings with other JSON files, for example, config/production.json.

Server Usage

To run the server, just run node index.js. You can use other node runners to keep the server always running like forever or nodemon.

Sending Emails

Once your server is up and running, all you need to do is create an HTML form and point it to your server.

Your form's action should point to your contact server using a valid email address (defined in the YAML file). If the email address is not in the whitelist, the email will not be sent.

Fields

• _from: Required. This is usually the email address of the user submitting the email form. It will be used as the Form field.
• _subject: Optional. The email subject.
• _info: Optional. This text will be included in the email body before the values. Useful for providing some context in the email body.
• _attachment: Optional. A file can be attached to the email form using this for the name of an <input type="file"/>. When sending attachments do not forget to include enctype="multipart/form-data" in your form tag.
• _next: Optional. A URL to redirect the user once the form was submitted successfully.
• _fake: For testing. If true, the email will not be sent and instead a JSON payload will be shown. Useful when testing the form with a REST client.

All other form fields will be sent by title casing the name. For example <input type="text" name="first_name" /> will be displayed in the email as "First Name:"