You found an HTML form generator, picked name, email and message, copied the code into your page and pressed Send. The page did something, maybe it reloaded or showed an error, and no message ever reached your inbox.

On 2 November we went through every site on Google's first page for "html form generator" and "contact form generator", 16 sites in total, and asked each one for that same three-field contact form. Nine wouldn't show any code without an account. The other seven gave us code, and we pasted each one into an empty page without changing a character and pressed Send with test data. None of them delivered the message.

The generators aren't broken. A form in HTML only collects the fields. Something on a server has to receive the POST and email it to you, and most generators leave that part to you without saying so loudly. Below is what each one actually hands you, and what you need to add.

We make Formgong, a form backend, and our generator was measured the same way.…