You have a static page with a contact form. You want what people write in it to arrive in your inbox. You search, and half the answers say mailto: , the other half say "use a backend", and nobody tells you which details will bite you at 2am when a customer says they wrote and you never got it. Here is the whole picture: why HTML alone can't do this, the three options that actually work, and the failure modes each one has. Why plain HTML can't send email A <form> eleme...