Introducing Formimp

I have been powering my contact forms with MS Teams for over a year now. The longer I do it, the more obvious it gets that it’s a better solution than typical email based contact form solutions. As I’ve talked to marketers, sales people and other people who run their businesses online, it’s become clear that they hate having to maintain email systems. And they end up forwarding most contacts to multiple people anyways.

So I built FormImp. It’s still in beta but it will be available to the public in a few weeks.

Technical overview

The application is mostly Python. I built it with Django and a whole bunch of components that I’ve already built for Django. The front end is UIKit and a very small amount of custom CSS. It’s extremely simple, accessible for sight impaired users and most importantly, results in extremely small payloads. One of my design goals is to keep every single page under 400 kilobytes and so far I have succeeded.

The marketing site uses the same base templates as the application, but it is built and served differently. It is completely static, built with Hugo and served on DigitalOcean’s App Platform. It’s only my second ever use of DO’s App Platform (this site is run on it as well) but so far I’m a big fan. Good job DigitalOcean.

Beta testing

FormImp is still in beta and is being used on both static and Wordpress powered sites. I have a few bugs to fix, some documentation to write and a couple usability problems to fix. But it’s within a week or two of going public.

Anti spam

Since FormImp lets users offload their contact forms to another service, it’s a good place to run antispam. Not only is it more efficient for one service to run antispam for many sites, but it gives me access to a considerable amount of spam.

I plan to give back to the web by contributing this information to spam block lists and automating abuse reports to hosts. In the last year, I’ve discovered that a lot of spam comes from poorly secured websites that run poorly secured mail services. Frankly, it feels good to be part of a solution and be able to go on the offense against form spam.