Contact Form Send Email From Site with Fastmail

October 7, 2023 • 11 min read

What a catchy title! So, I thought it’d be a good idea to completely move away from using Airtable. I used Airtable for my short URL service I created and for various config options for the Let’s Work Together page on my site. I moved them all to Upstash Redis except for the contact form.

I have several posts on setting up a contact form with SvelteKit which I have done in the past. This time I’ll be using nodemailer and Fastmail. I’ve been a Fastmail user for a while now and I wanted to drop the Airtable automation and use Fastmail to send the email from the contact form on my site to me. If you’re interested in checking out Fastmail you can use my referral link to get 10% off your first year.

The inspiration for this comes from a WebJeda video, Sharath is a great educator for Svelte with a lot of content on his YouTube channel.

I absolutely love Fastmail! There’s a tag for it on it on the site if you want to see some more content from me on it!

App password is the way

This post was initially me trying to document my way around using the Fastmail API. I tried to use the JMAP API to send the email but I couldn’t get it to work other than creating a draft email. 😅

I ended up using an app password to send the email. Again like I did with the API key, I did a bit of validation with curl first, I set the app password into a variable and then used that variable in the curl command.

The app password is set up in the Fastmail settings, you can find it under the Privacy & Security > Integrations section.

For the new app password the name was a custom name, and selected the “Mail (IMAP/POP/SMTP)” option, then generated the password.

The curl command looked something like this.

export APP_PASSWORD="my-app-password"

curl --url "smtps://smtp.fastmail.com:465" --ssl-reqd 
 --mail-from "[email protected]" --mail-rcpt "[email protected]" 
 --user "[email protected]:$APP_PASSWORD" 
 -T email.txt

The email.txt file contains the email headers and body, so something like this.

From: Sender Name <[email protected]>
To: Receiver Name <[email protected]>
Subject: Test Email Subject

This is the body of the test email.

Sending that off with curl sends the email to the recipient.

Ok, now I’ve validated I can send and email with curl I can move on to the contact form.

Using a SvelteKit action

So like I did with Switching from Brevo to Buttondown I’m using a SvelteKit action to send the email. The reasoning is the same as with the newsletter sign up form, I want to be able to use the contact form in a few places on the site as a component. I already have a pre-existing /contact route, so I’ll create a +page.server.ts file in there for the action.

Here’s the first pass where I hard-code in the email values, I’ll get these off of the request eventually but for now I want to send something via a button click on a form.

import {
  EMAIL_APP_PASSWORD,
  EMAIL_APP_TO_ADDRESS,
  EMAIL_APP_USER,
} from '$env/static/private'
import { fail } from '@sveltejs/kit'
import nodemailer from 'nodemailer'

export const actions = {
  default: async () => {
    try {
      const name = 'scott'
      const email = '[email protected]'
      const reason = 'laptop'
      const message = 'laptop pls'

      // Create a transporter object using the nodemailer library
      const transporter = nodemailer.createTransport({
        host: 'smtp.fastmail.com',
        port: 465,
        secure: true,
        auth: {
          user: EMAIL_APP_USER,
          pass: EMAIL_APP_PASSWORD,
        },
      })

      // Set up email data
      const mail_options = {
        from: `"${name}" <${email}>`,
        to: EMAIL_APP_TO_ADDRESS,
        subject: reason,
        text: message,
      }

      // Send email
      const info = await transporter.sendMail(mail_options)

      return {
        status: 200,
        body: {
          message: 'Email sent successfully',
          messageId: info.messageId,
        },
      }
    } catch (error) {
      return fail(500, {
        error: 'Internal server error',
      })
    }
  },
}

Essentially what happening here is that the SMTP server is being created with the nodemailer library, then the email data is set up and finally the email is sent via the sendMail method.

I have EMAIL_APP_PASSWORD as the app password I created earlier, EMAIL_APP_TO_ADDRESS is the email address I want to send the email to and EMAIL_APP_USER is the email address I’m sending the email from.

Ok, now to set up a simple form to test the email being sent.

Essentially I just want to trigger the action on a button click, so something like this.

<script lang="ts">
  import { enhance } from '$app/forms'
</script>

<form
  method="POST"
  action="/contact"
  use:enhance={() => {
    return ({ update, result }) => {
      console.log('=====================')
      console.log(result)
      console.log('=====================')
      update({ reset: true })
    }
  }}
>
  <input type="submit" value="test!" />
</form>

Note that I’m pointing the action to the /contact route. This will trigger the default action in the +page.server.ts file.

I’m logging out the result of the action, to see what I get back on the client.

The result object looks like this.

{
  "type": "success",
  "status": 200,
  "data": {
    "status": 200,
    "body": {
      "message": "Email sent successfully",
      "messageId": "<[email protected]>"
    }
  }
}

Neat! Now I can start scaffolding out the rest of the markup for the form. One important thing to remember when you’re submitting a form to an action is that you need to set the name attribute on the inputs. This is so that the request object can pick up the values from the request.formData.

This also means that unless I need to, there’s no need to set variables for the form values in the form, I can just use the request object to get the values in the action.

I’ll create a handle_result function to handle the result object from the action. I’ll also set a success variable to true if the email is sent successfully.

<script lang="ts">
  import { enhance } from '$app/forms'
  import type { ActionResult } from '@sveltejs/kit'

  let action_result: ActionResult
  let success = false
  let message_type: 'error' | 'success' = 'error'

  const handle_result = (result: ActionResult) => {
    action_result = result
    if (result.type === 'success') {
      success = true
    } else if (result.type === 'failure') {
      message_type = 'error'
    }
  }
</script>

<form
  method="POST"
  action="/contact"
  enctype="multipart/form-data"
  use:enhance={() => {
    return ({ update, result }) => {
      handle_result(result)
      update({ reset: true })
    }
  }}
>
  <label for="name">
    <span>Name</span>
  </label>
  <input
    type="text"
    id="name"
    name="name"
    aria-label="name"
    placeholder="Name"
    required
  />
  <label for="email">
    <span>Email</span>
  </label>
  <input
    type="email"
    id="email"
    name="email"
    aria-label="email"
    placeholder="Email"
    required
  />
  <label for="reason">
    <span>Reason</span>
  </label>
  <select id="reason" name="reason" aria-label="reason" required>
    <option disabled value="">Contact reason</option>
    <option value="hi">Say hi!</option>
    <option value="collaboration">Collaboration request</option>
    <option value="speak">Speaking opportunity</option>
  </select>
  <label for="message">
    <span>Message</span>
  </label>
  <textarea
    id="message"
    name="message"
    aria-label="message"
    placeholder="Hey! I'd love to talk about..."
    required
  />
  <button type="submit">Submit</button>
</form>

I’m using the enhance function to handle the result object from the action. I’m also using the update function to reset the form after it’s been submitted.

If you’re testing stuff out then maybe set update({ reset: false }) so you’re not constantly re-entering the form values.

Success / Fail message

Aight! So, using the result object from enhance I can set a success variable to true if the email is sent successfully.

This means that I can conditionally render a success message if the email is sent successfully.

Now, rather than have the code for several different messages in the markup I’ll create a success and failure component to handle the different messages.

Just a preference of mine to keep the Svelte files a little less cluttered.

Here’s the file structure I’m going to use.

├── src
│   ├── lib
│   │   └── components
│   │       ├── contact-form
│   │       │   ├── contact-form-failure.svelte
│   │       │   ├── contact-form-fields.svelte
│   │       │   ├── contact-form-success.svelte
│   │       │   ├── contact-form.svelte
│   │       │   └── index.ts
│   │       └── index.ts
│   ├── routes
│   │   ├── contact
│   │   │   ├── +page.server.ts
│   │   │   └── +page.svelte
│   │   ├── +layout.svelte
│   │   └── +page.svelte

You can check out the example repo for the full code.

Success and failure components are almost identical, but the failure component can have the error object passed in to it to give a bit more information to the user.

contact-form-success.svelte

<h3>Success!</h3>

<p>This is the message.</p>

<p>On successful submit!</p>

contact-form-failure.svelte

<h3>Failure!</h3>

<p>This is the message.</p>

<p>On failed submit!</p>

Conditional render the success / failure components

Ok, so, now, in the contact-form.svelte file I can import the success fail and the fields components and conditionally render them based on the success variable.

So, contact-form.svelte was the main form, now I’ve abstracted out all the inputs to the contact-form-fields.svelte file but I’m keeping the handle_result function in the contact-form.svelte file so that I can use the success variable to conditionally render the success or failure components.

I’ve added in a spin transition to the success and failure that was taken straight from the learn.svelte.dev tutorial for custom CSS transitions.

<script lang="ts">
  import type { ActionResult } from '@sveltejs/kit'
  import { elasticOut } from 'svelte/easing'
  import { fade } from 'svelte/transition'
  import ContactFormFailure from './contact-form-failure.svelte'
  import ContactFormFields from './contact-form-fields.svelte'
  import ContactFormSuccess from './contact-form-success.svelte'

  let action_result: ActionResult
  let success = false
  let message_type: 'error' | 'success' = 'error'

  const handle_result = (result: ActionResult) => {
    action_result = result
    if (result.type === 'success') {
      success = true
    } else if (result.type === 'failure') {
      message_type = 'error'
    }
  }

  // https://learn.svelte.dev/tutorial/custom-css-transitions
  export const spin = (
    node: HTMLDivElement,
    { delay, duration }: { delay: number; duration: number },
  ) => {
    return {
      delay,
      duration,
      css: (t: any) => {
        const eased = elasticOut(t)
        return `
          transform: scale(${eased}) rotate(${eased * 360}deg);
          `
      },
    }
  }
</script>

{#if success}
  <div in:spin={{ delay: 900, duration: 1400 }}>
    <ContactFormSuccess />
  </div>
{:else if action_result?.type === 'failure'}
  <div in:spin={{ delay: 900, duration: 1400 }}>
    <ContactFormFailure />
  </div>
{:else}
  <div out:fade={{ delay: 200, duration: 400 }}>
    <ContactFormFields {handle_result} />
  </div>
{/if}

The contact-form-fields.svelte file looks like this now:

<script lang="ts">
  import { enhance } from '$app/forms'
  export let handle_result: Function
</script>

<form
  method="POST"
  action="/contact"
  enctype="multipart/form-data"
  use:enhance={() => {
    return ({ update, result }) => {
      handle_result(result)
      update({ reset: true })
    }
  }}
>
  <label for="name">
    <span>Name</span>
  </label>
  <input
    type="text"
    id="name"
    name="name"
    aria-label="name"
    placeholder="Name"
    required
  />
  <label for="email">
    <span>Email</span>
  </label>
  <input
    type="email"
    id="email"
    name="email"
    aria-label="email"
    placeholder="Email"
    required
  />
  <!-- honeypot -->
  <input
    type="text"
    name="subject"
    id="subject"
    class="hidden"
    value=""
  />
  <label for="reason">
    <span>Reason</span>
  </label>
  <select id="reason" name="reason" aria-label="reason" required>
    <option disabled selected value="">Contact reason</option>
    <option value="hi">Say hi!</option>
    <option value="collaboration">Collaboration request</option>
    <option value="speak">Speaking opportunity</option>
  </select>
  <label for="message">
    <span>Message</span>
  </label>
  <textarea
    id="message"
    name="message"
    aria-label="message"
    placeholder="Hey! I'd love to talk about..."
    required
  />
  <button type="submit">Submit</button>
</form>

I’ve removed all the Tailwind classes for brevity, just note that the honeypot field should be hidden with CSS classes.

Oh, the honeypot! About that…

Honeypot

Soon after deploying the form I started getting spam emails, I implemented a honeypot to try and catch the spam bots.

Admittedly something I never got with using the Airtable automations so I’m guessing they may have had some spam filtering in place on Airtable with certain IP addresses blocked.

For the honeypot I added a hidden input field to the form and then checked for it’s value in the action. This is a simple check to see if the field has a value, if it does then it’s a spam bot that’s filled in the field.

<!-- honeypot -->
<input type="text" name="subject" id="subject" class="hidden" />

On the server side I check for the subject field and if it has a value then I’ll short-circuit the action and return an early 200 status code and success message.

if (subject) {
  // Honeypot
  return {
    status: 200,
    body: {
      message: 'Email sent successfully',
    },
  }
}

This isn’t a foolproof way of catching spam but it’s a start.

The full +page.server.ts file looks like this:

import {
  EMAIL_APP_PASSWORD,
  EMAIL_APP_TO_ADDRESS,
  EMAIL_APP_USER,
} from '$env/static/private'
import { fail } from '@sveltejs/kit'
import nodemailer from 'nodemailer'

export const actions = {
  default: async ({ request }) => {
    try {
      const data = await request.formData()
      const name = data.get('name')?.toString()
      const email = data.get('email')?.toString()
      const subject = data.get('subject')?.toString()
      const reason = data.get('reason')?.toString()
      const message = data.get('message')?.toString()

      if (subject) {
        // Honeypot
        return {
          status: 200,
          body: {
            message: 'Email sent successfully',
          },
        }
      }

      // Create a transporter object using the nodemailer library
      const transporter = nodemailer.createTransport({
        host: 'smtp.fastmail.com',
        port: 465,
        secure: true,
        auth: {
          user: EMAIL_APP_USER,
          pass: EMAIL_APP_PASSWORD,
        },
      })

      // Set up email data
      const mail_options = {
        from: `"${name}" <${email}>`,
        to: EMAIL_APP_TO_ADDRESS,
        subject: reason,
        text: message,
      }

      // Send email
      const info = await transporter.sendMail(mail_options)

      return {
        status: 200,
        body: {
          message: 'Email sent successfully',
          messageId: info.messageId,
        },
      }
    } catch (error) {
      return fail(500, {
        error: 'Internal server error',
      })
    }
  },
}

Vercel edge functions

If you’re using Vercel edge functions on your site then you’ll need to export the runtime for Vercel serverless config, add the config to the +page.server.ts file.

export const config: ServerlessConfig = {
  runtime: 'nodejs18.x',
}

Otherwise you should be golden, the example repo uses @sveltejs/adapter-auto and works fine.

Example repo

I’ve created an example repo for this post, you can check out the demo on Vercel, it doesn’t submit anywhere. You want to reach out then please use the contact form here.

Conclusion

This guide demonstrated a method to set up a contact form on a SvelteKit application, utilising Fastmail and nodemailer for email dispatch.

A form setup followed, connecting to a server action to handle submissions, and displaying a success or failure message accordingly.

A honeypot implementation added a layer of spam protection, serving as a simple measure against bot submissions. While not foolproof, it’s a step towards reducing spam.

This process not only streamlined the contact form setup but also created a foundation for further enhancements and integrations on my site.

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