mailstatic

A small python based server which allows you to send mails from a static webpage via a simple HTML form.

Amongst others, mailstatic is based on technologies like flask, sqlalchemy and gunicorn.

How does it work?

Workflow

Simple and straight forward:

1. The POST request of your form is forwarded to your mailstatic server.
2. The server accepts the post request and its parameters and sends a mail with the given information towards the provided address.
3. The provided email address receives the mail that was created by the HTML form.

Use Cases & Advantages

mailstatic really comes in handy if you want to provide a static HTML page with no actual backend. By using mailstatic, there is no need for additional technologies like Javascript or PHP which enables your project to have a much smaller code base and to be much thinner in total. If you want to build a lightweight page, mailstatic is an easy-to-use tool to process user inputs by simply adding HTML forms.

Additionally to a much thinner project, mailstatic brings a separate system taking care of all the user input processing which can be scaled to any need. The server saves all of the received input in a PostgreSQL DB which allows you to track, retrace and process the received input.

Due to security mechanisms like Googles Recaptcha v2 an abuse of the service is prevented.

To prevent abuse there is also a configurable rate limit set for every endpoint which is capable of sending emails.

Setup

Server Setup

There are two ways to run the server. But in any case you should make sure the server is configured correctly.

The web-example.env provides necessary environment variables that the server uses to process certain actions:

RECAPTCHA_SITEKEY=6LeIxAcTAAAAAJcZVRqyHh71UMIEGNQ_MXjiZKhI
RECAPTCHA_SECRET=6LeIxAcTAAAAAGG-vFI1TnRWxMZNFuojJ4WifJWe
IMAP_SERVER=mail.test.server
IMAP_USER=system@mailstatic.net
IMAP_PASSWORD=XXXXXXXXXXXXX
SERVER_ADDRESS=https://mailstatic.net
DATABASE_URI=postgresql+psycopg2://postgres:postgres@db/postgres

You need to provide details for your IMAP Server and it's user so that the server can use a provided email account to forward the content of the POST request received from the HTML form. Additionally you can configure your server address, the URI of the database and your Google Recaptcha information (check out the Googles Recaptcha Site to receive your information).

After providing the necessary information you can start the server.

Using python on your machine

1. Open your commandline and navigate inside the project folder.
2. Run pip install -r .\requirements.txt to install necessary dependencies (in case it's not working try python -m pip install -r .\requirements.txtpip install -r .\requirements.txt).
3. Run python .\runserver.py to boot the server.
4. You should see the following message Running on http://[::]:5000/ (Press CTRL+C to quit).
5. If you want to start the production server, start it with gunicorn: pipenv run pipenv run gunicorn mailstatic:app --bind 0.0.0.0:5000. It may be a good idea to use a reverse-proxy like nginx in front of it to terminate SSL and buffer slow requests. Checkout the project for configuration examples.

Using docker

1. Open your command-line and navigate inside the project folder.
2. Check if the provided docker-compose.yml file serves your needs. (E.g. the run command)
3. Use docker-compose up or docker-compose -f docker-compose.prod.yml up to start the container.
4. You should see the following message: Running on http://[::]:5000/ (Press CTRL+C to quit)

Alternatively you can also pull our image directly from the docker hub using docker pull taliox/mailstatic.

HTML setup

To setup a HTML form on your webpage simply copy the following code:

<form action="yourdomain/s/your@mail.com" method="POST">
    <input name="name" required="" type="text">
    <input name="replyto" required="" type="email">
    <textarea name="message"></textarea>
    <input value="Send" type="submit">
</form>

All input of this form is now forwarded to your server.

Contributing

Pull requests for improvements of the project or its documentation are also highly appreciated.

Licenses

This library and its content is released under the MIT License.