This site has been through all sorts of revisions. So have all my other sites. One of the things that has always bothered me is the simple act of having a contact form or email subscription form.

This site is built on WordPress. There are thousands of plugins available for adding forms to your site. They all suck. I’ve used them all. I don’t want email tracking or logging. I don’t want third party integration. I simply want to connect a website to my email inbox and I want to do it without any sort of privacy concerns.

I also don’t want to install some sort of additional plugin to handle emails via SMTP. WordPress core includes PHP Mailer by default. Why is there no way to configure the settings for that anywhere in WordPress? I have no idea. Again, there are plugins that will do this for you. You know what comes with those plugins? More tracking and logging and “premium” features and…. ugh.

NO. STOP.

So, I built it myself. A plugin that does NOTHING but email me when someone types something in a form.

It has ballooned a bit with lots of admin options, and is nowhere near ready for the larger WordPress ecosystem, but it’s a functional plugin. It does everything I need it to do, perhaps with some hacky workarounds. I doubt I’ll ever get this thing across the finish line for a wider release, but I did open the GitHub repository if you want to take a look.

https://github.com/cheveedodd/clean-contact-form

My biggest concern? What will spambots do to this thing? There’s a few conventional traps for them, but nothing intrusive like RECAPTCHa or other “human proof” safeguards. Maybe someone will take it and run with it. If not, I’ll put it to use on all my sites because it’s perfect for me and my particular hosting situation.

So, if you’ve ever tried signing up for my mailing list and didn’t get anywhere with that, you can now. What happens when you do that? My plugin simply sends me an email. That’s it. No logging. No database interactions. Just simple email. The way it used to be.