Contact Mailer

A minimal python app to send mail when people fills in your contact form!

Why?

Here at Jean-Cloud, we are fans of static websites. They are easily distributed, use few ressources and are very secured.

But the first limitation is… No interractions… So no contact form… That would be a shame to deploy a website without a contact section!

How does it work?

Create the contact form

• Create or reuse an existing contact form
• Add the action parameter to the mailer address + /submit
• Get a token from this mailer app and place it in your form like :

<form action="https://mailer.jean-cloud.net/submit" method="POST">
    <input type="mail" name="mail" />
    <input type="text" name="nom" />
    <input type="text" name="objet" />
    <textarea name="contenu" required="required"></textarea>
    <input type="hidden" name="token" value="eYEqyDXk4bKgFrwuWdN0B9UZtOnIlJcRzx8mh2jCsPTAH7V5QS" />
    <input type="submit" />
</form>

Identifying on the mailer

Ask for an account to the mailer admin. They will hand you a password like : hepaNRSkqcxKD1QujwTr9I6XyiA7VOCGnsWbMtdlZJz0o8ULHP

Configure the mail sending

You can choose how information sent with form will be displayed in the final mail! Actually there are two templatable fields: the mail subject and content. Here is a template example :

subject: "[Contact] {{nom|anonyme}} — {{object|no object}}"
content: "Message de contact :%0D%0A{{message}}"

When the form will be submitted to the mailer, parts like {{…}} will be replaced by fields content of the same name!
If the field holds no value, two possibilities:

• The default value specified after | is used
• There is no default value, the form is rejected. TIP: you can set an empty default value in order to have a facultative field: {{name|}}.

Installation

Docker

docker pull jeancloud/contact-mailer

Git & Pip in virtualenv

git clone https://git.jean-cloud.net/adrian/contact-mailer
cd contact-mailer
virtualenv venv
. venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Running it

The app needs a lot of env vars to run :

SMTP_SERVER_ADDRESS=mail.gandi.net
SMTP_SERVER_PORT=465
SMTP_SSL=true
SMTP_SERVER_USERNAME=noreply@example.net
SMTP_SERVER_PASSWORD=bigpass
SMTP_SERVER_SENDER=noreply@example.net
MONGODB_HOST=mongodb
ADMIN_PASSWORD=test
UID=1000

You can store them in a .env file. The python app will read it or you can pass it to the docker container with run option --env-file.

• SMTP_* are used to connect to the smtp server that will send the mail.
• SMTP_SSL is used to enable SSL
• SMTP_STARTTLS is used to enable STARTTLS if SMTP_SSL is not defined. In no ssl and starttls are defined the app wont connect.
• MONGODB_HOST the host to connect to mongodb
• ADMIN_PASSWORD password used to manage users
• UID used to set the uwsg socket ownership in production

Client

plain or light theme.

Roadmap

Near future

• use a standart logger (used by bottle and uwsgi) to log error on mail fail
• unit tests
• add redirection urls to form config
• Include some capcha support
• Correctly escape html entities
• Sign mails with the server key
• Use a dedicated SMTP server

Ameliorations

• Use real user/passwords accounts
• Create a gui client