Show HN: Mailik – Effortlessly Receive Form Responses in Your Inbox | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Mailik – Effortlessly Receive Form Responses in Your Inbox

mailik.dev

29 pointsPondSwimmer39 comments

Hello, Mailik is a really simple tool mostly made by my "szwagier". It was our internal tool for a long time, but now, we want to make it public as it is useful.

Flow: User submits a form on any of your websites -> website uses mailik sdk -> form submission is sent to one or more emails you specified in mailik dashboard.

The reason we made it - we always missed those submissions when they were submitted to CRM somehow.

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I like this! I feel like I've written a half-version of this a dozen times, it's nice to see a version which is fully fleshed out.

One feature request: you could likely fully remove the need for an NPM package by accepting POST requests from forms, and staple the API key in with either the URL or an <input type="hidden" value="key"/>—is that in the roadmap?

Good idea! We will add it!

I'd love this service but how are you going to handle bots? I wanted this for my personal website which will maybe receive an email once per month in the best case scenario, but with lambdas there is always the risk of having a malicious actor coming in and pushing your bill to astronomical levels

That's what I did here: https://www.simplecontactform.org The presentation isn't fleshed out because we mostly use it for our agency clients but it is the most minimal version I could come up with.

I always liked the idea for your service but the pricing didn't work (to be clear: it's not your fault, I'm not sure it is solvable). I wanted to use it for my personal website which will receive maybe 10 emails through the year (if I'm lucky), but at $5/month I can just spin up my own VPS, which can do way more than sending me emails.

That makes total sense. I set this up for our agency clients to be able to integrate email sending on a static site without having to manage a server or dive into spam filtering. For them the decreased complexity and time saved alone is usually worth the price.

I see! Makes sense, thank you for the response

Isn't it too technical for customers like "freelancers & small companies"? They have to know how to install a npm package and use it which excludes most standard cms sites like wordpress. Why is this not a "no-code" drop in snippet where stuff could be configured in the dashboard.

Nice idea, we will discuss how we could make it happen soon

Wufoo.com does this. The MBAs won over there though so lots of opportunities to be better.

Thanks for that! It will help us create a direction for mailik. Obviously we are small team that does side-projects from time to time, but we can take what's useful from it.

I like the website. Did you start with a specific template?

It's a modification of the https://shadcn-landing-page.vercel.app/

Typo in the following sentence on the landing page

> Set up a trigger action which will make Mailik send you the form resposne.

resposne instead of response

edit: another one

> Manage all your forms esponses.

esponses instead of response

Thanks!

fixed, thanks again!

Also “admin panlu”

Nice. I always like to see email being leveraged.

Thanks

Conversely I feel like self-hosters and smaller email services are getting pushed out by spammers and the rotating IP reputation problem with RBLs.

This has been done a thousand times.

nice to see a simple solution to a common problem.

how do you handle spam submissions? do you have any built-in filtering or do you rely on the user's email provider to catch the junk mail?

also, what third party are you using to ensure deliverability of mail?

its not an issue as emails are always send from the same domain - mailik.dev, so you can whitelist in your inbox to make sure its not detected as spam. regarding the spam sumbmision, this is an interesting topic. as for now we're fully leaving building and handling forms for our users, what we do is just handling email delivery :)

For me to consider this an option, spam filtering is a must.

I often point forms at client email addresses and can’t risk them getting a bunch of spam.

Yes but mailik only sends mails to your addresses not clients. However we will think how to filter spam ofc

Oh then I misunderstood.

Sending to in-the-loop third parties is a must. I’ve set up 1 form that goes to me directly and hundreds which go to others.

Curious to hear if you generally prefer to manage client's forms and billing through your own account or have them create their own and share credentials with you?

I think there are 2 situations: - 1 client is not technical at all - so you manage on your acc - client is ok with having their own acc, then it is much better option

That makes sense. Are you currently using something more involved, e.g. Form Spree?

nope

I think in a full build out, being able to manage forms+billing through a "developer account" that allows me to manage their stuff would be nice.

I would _especially_ like that the developer account gets like 3 free forms as long as clients are paying.

This idea needs exploring. It is good, but a little bit complicated.

Maybe just sending the confirmation without the actual message. World is transforming and sending to people who filled out the form may open the gates to spammers. What do you think?

I think looking at how Gravity Forms (and similar) handles this within the WP ecosystem is a helpful starting point. A lot of expectations around what a form service does and doesn't do are set by those plugins – for better or worse.

I personally believe that sending a confirmation to the person filling out the form is a requirement, in some cases, and not having it would be a mistake.

Forms are tough! Glad ya'll are working on it.

Ok I will definitely take a look. Making integrations is a good next step for mailik. Thank you very much!!!

Is this FOSS?

No. We produce a lot of open source - we can definitely provide version to self-host later.

> We produce a lot of open source

Got a link?

https://github.com/aexol-studio

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