What's a good beginner setup for contact forms on small polymer/firebase hosted pages?

[kleiner....@googlemail.com]

I am a self taught beginner, starting to develop small web apps for customers to show their holiday rentals with booking calendars and booking / contact forms. 

I discovered Polymer and Firebase Hosting and love both their simplicity and ease of use, and also the breadth of tutorials and documentation available. 

However, when trying to implement a simple contact form, it seems I have only three (unfortunate) options:

• I could either use an iron-form and bindings to populate a mailto link.
  

But this way users don't really send a form when hitting submit. Rather they are taken to their system's mail client, which would contradict their expectations. Also, this is open the possibility of someone sending dangerous attachments to my customers, who might then trust these emails just because I have pre-populated the mail's subject line with text they are used to.

• Another option seems to be one "central" mail domain for all customers/domains I support. So in this case I would redirect users from my customers' domains / contact pages to this "support  domain" for mailing with a nodejs server.
  

However, users don't expect to be taken to a totally different domain just for mailing, so this is probably also bad UX.

 

• So it seems that setting up node.js servers for all domains I support - is in fact the way to go.

Yet unfortunately this is too expensive. As I am competing with cheap website toolboxes, my customers are not willing to pay more than 10-15$/year for domain renewal + hosting anymore. Also, this may well be overkill for just being able to receive emails anyway, as these customers tend to not receive more that 5 emails per month. 

 

So my question is: did I totally miss the obvious alternative? Or what are you experienced developers using here? Would I be best off returning to traditional web hosting and use PHP to send email? I looked at formspree.io also, but it seems that I cannot fully customize email branding there. 

I know Polymer is client side only and I can't put any code on Firebase servers, so probably I'm all out on my own here, but anyway I'd be very happy if you would share your thoughts and experiences with me!

Thank you!

[to.ks...@gmail.com]

Did u try posting this question on stack overflow?

[LightToDark]

Yes, I did, but it received multiple downvotes within minutes and got taken off of stack overflow within an hour because it was regarded as opinion based. Which I frankly don't understand, as you cannot decide on a setup without having an opinion, and deciding on a good setup is a crucial question for any beginner. They told me to ask these kinds of questions in different places that were open to coding related discussions and tipgiving / guidance, and so I tried my luck here.

[Jens Kragelund]

Maybe you could make your Polymer App do an AJAX request to a web server (node or PHP or whatever you prefer) which then handles all your mailing.

[LightToDark]

Oh, I see, so I don't have to redirect, and I don't need a server for every domain either. I can handle all mailing from one single server, and just need to work out any related SOP/CORS issues ? 

That would be perfect, thank you! I'll try to implement that!