Formplug is a form forwarding service for AWS Lambda, use it to accept form submissions by email without server-side code. It's built using the Serverless Framework and uses Amazon SES to send emails.

Set the form action to your Formplug endpoint to have form submissions forwarded on by email. Email addresses can be passed in plain text (as in the example below) or encrypted as a hexedecimal string (see next section).

<form action="https://apigatewayurl.com" method="post">
    <input type="hidden" name="_to" value="[email protected]">
    <input type="text" name="message">
    <input type="submit" value="send">
</form>

Append format=json to the query string of the endpoint to get responses back in JSON with a CORS allow all origin header. You should do this if you plan on working with the API using JavaScript.

<form action="https://apigatewayurl.com?format=json" method="post">
    <input type="hidden" name="_to" value="[email protected]">
    <input type="text" name="message">
    <input type="submit" value="send">
</form>

Use a select if you want to change where the email goes based on a user choice.

<select name="_to">
  <option value="[email protected]">Recipient option 1</option>
  <option value="[email protected]">Recipient option 2</option>
</select>

Separate multiple email addresses by a semicolon.

<!-- plain text emails -->
<input type="hidden" name="_cc" value="[email protected];[email protected]"

<!-- encrypted emails -->
<input type="hidden" name="_cc" value="ff19d0abcd474813ad;c031a9b24855090b5e8b">

When using the honeypot field you should use CSS to hide the input and keep the type as text.

<input type="text" name="_honeypot" value="" style="display:none">

Users will be shown a generic form submission success message if a redirect URL isn't provided. This message can be customised through adding a MSG_RECEIVE_SUCCESS entry to config.json. Similarly, the subject line for emails can be customised through MSG_SUBJECT in config.json.

Email addresses can be encrypted so that they're not visible in the HTML source. Ensure ENCRYPTION_KEY in config.json is set to a unique random value as this is used to determine the encrypted values.

> npm run encrypt [email protected]
[email protected] => ff17d6a0cd474813adc031a9b24855090b5e8b

> npm run decrypt ff17d6a0cd474813adc031a9b24855090b5e8b
ff17d6a0cd474813adc031a9b24855090b5e8b => [email protected]

Follow the instructions on the Serverless website to install the Serverless Framework and setup your AWS credentials.

Amazon SES can only send emails from addresses that you have verified ownership of. Verification can be done using the AWS Management Console by visiting the SES Dashboard and heading to Identity Management. AWS also puts new SES accounts under limits which prevent emails from being sent to email addresses that haven't been verified. Check out the relevant AWS SES documentation for more information. The limits can be lifted by opening a support ticket as outlined in the docs, but this takes a few hours to approve.

Run npm install to get the NPM dependencies.

Create a copy of config.sample.json as config.json and then customise as appropriate for your setup.

Run serverless deploy to deploy to AWS.