How do I send email with JavaScript without opening the mail client?

Question

I'm writing a HTML page with a registration button that should just silently send an email without opening the local mail client. Here is my HTML:

<form method="post" action="">
    <input type="text" id="email_address" name="name" placeholder="Enter your email address..." required>
    <button onclick="sendMail(); return false">Send Email</button>
</form>

... and here is my JavaScript code:

<script type="text/javascript">
  function sendMail() {
    var link = 'mailto:[email protected]?subject=Message from '
             +document.getElementById('email_address').value
             +'&body='+document.getElementById('email_address').value;
    window.location.href = link;
}
</script>

The code above works... but it opens the local email client. If I remove the return statement in the onclick attribute like this:

<form method="post" action="">
    <input type="text" id="email_address" name="name" placeholder="Enter your email address..." required>
    <button onclick="sendMail()">Send Email</button>
</form>

... then the email is not sent at all. Am I missing something?

Any help would be reeeally appreciated :-)

Answer 1

You need a server-side support to achieve this. Basically your form should be posted (AJAX is fine as well) to the server and that server should connect via SMTP to some mail provider and send that e-mail.

Even if it was possible to send e-mails directly using JavaScript (that is from users computer), the user would still have to connect to some SMTP server (like gmail.com), provide SMTP credentials, etc. This is normally handled on the server-side (in your application), which knows these credentials.

Answer 2

You cannot cause the user's browser to send email silently. That would be a horrible security problem as any website could use their system as a spam relay and/or harvest their email address.

You need to make an HTTP request to a server side process (written in the language of your choice) which sends the mail from your server.