I am moving my personal web site from netlify to a VPS. It runs via Caddy as just a plain, static web site generated from Hugo. Netlify offered a free contact form, but now I need to provide my own solution, somehow.

I’d like to self-host that too, if possible, on the VPS but then I need to handle spam blocking, form validation, possibly capcha, and sending the outbound email myself - and I don’t have experience doing any of that. An AI chatbot suggested a python script using flask but I would still need to do a bunch to make that work, I think.

There are a number of form handling cloud services online (such as staticforms dot xyz) but then the form submissions are going through their servers. My visitors probably wouldn’t care, but I would still prefer to self-host something, if it’s not too hard to setup.

What do you all recommend? Anyone find a clever solution to this already?

I already have a “comments” feature wired into the site - I could just stick with that but some people seem to still prefer to contact me directly, instead of using that.

EDIT: This is all done - thanks for all the great ideas, you all rock!