Sending a plain HTML form to inboxy

You don't need a server to collect a contact form. Point an ordinary HTML <form> at a mailto: address and the visitor's own mail app sends it — and using a disposable @inboxy.net alias as the target means you can retire it the moment it starts attracting spam, without touching your real inbox.

The form

<form action="mailto:quiet-otter-47@inboxy.net" method="post" enctype="text/plain">
  <input type="text" name="Your name">
  <input type="text" name="Address">
  <textarea name="Message"></textarea>
  <input type="submit" value="Submit">
</form>

Mint a fresh address for this and use it as the action. Give it a label like website-contact-form so you recognise it later.

What actually happens when someone clicks Submit

This is the part people get wrong: the browser does not send anything over the network. mailto: isn't an HTTP endpoint — it's an instruction to open whatever mail app is registered on the visitor's device, pre-filled with the field names and values as the body, addressed to your inboxy alias. The visitor still has to hit send in their own mail client.

That means:

• A visitor with no configured mail app gets nothing to submit. Increasingly common on phones and in browsers with no default mail handler — the click silently does nothing, or opens a picker they abandon.
• Nothing is validated or required server-side. A blank "Message" field submits fine; you're relying on the visitor's mail client, not your markup, for anything beyond basic browser field validation.
• Support is inconsistent across browsers. enctype="text/plain" for mailto: forms is a long-standing HTML feature, but exactly how field data is laid out in the body (and whether it fires at all without a click, or from a background tab) varies by browser and by which mail app is registered. Test in the browsers your actual visitors use before relying on it.

If you need a form that reliably reaches you even when a visitor has no mail client configured, you need a real backend (your own server, or a third-party form-relay service) that sends the email itself — mailto: forms are a no-backend convenience, not a guarantee of delivery.

Why point it at inboxy instead of your real address

The action="mailto:…" value sits in your page's HTML source — anyone can view it, and scrapers do. If you put your personal address there directly, it's exposed forever.

Point it at a disposable inboxy alias instead:

• If the address starts attracting spam, retire it and mint a new one for the form — your real email is never in the page source.
• The label you gave it when minting shows up next to incoming mail, so submissions are easy to pick out from everything else in your inbox.
• Want your agent to triage submissions automatically? See Connecting an AI agent.

Stuck?

support@inboxy.net.