How to get data from web forms without a server

[Goverp]

My old school alumni group are organizing a commemorative event and want members to book online for various activities. Their first thought was to use Adobe PDF forms, as they pay a (very expensive) licence for Adobe products for use with their web site. (The web site is actually just a load of simple web pages and loads of photos, so the Adobe stuff is hardly being used, but that's not my remit.) However, AFAICT Adobe's documentation says that when the user clicks on Submit for their completed form, it sends some formatted extract of the data (FSF file, IIRC) to a web server, expecting a CGI script or similar to process it. Needless to say, there's no they can get such a script onto the commercial third party's web service used.

My alternative suggestion is a simple HTML form to send an email to the organizer, populated with booking details from the form. But it's years since I wrote any HTML containing forms, so I'm not sure if that's even possible. A brief Google search results suggest it would be a minefield, and the organizer's inbox would rapidly fill with spam after miners found the email address.

Any suggestions, alternatives and experiences would be most gratefully received.

(And for background information, the society's webmaster uses either an iPad or a Windows desktop PC, so the Gentoo and Linux aspects are negligible.)
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Greybeard

[eccerr0r]

Welcome to form processing...

I suspect you mean you want to do what's under the hood like how f.g.o accepts peoples' posts and saves it to a database?

I do have to agree with the sentiment with spam and also people doing brute force attacks. However I've written a few CGI processors of form data and monitor what people http post. For the most part people just put in crap and see if the crap they put in shows up somewhere they can easily see. If they do see this, they will keep on doing it -- not unlike spam posts on phpbb on f.g.o. This is the major concern.

I also have a cgi form login. This has a lot of security issues as well as cross site scripting issues. Agree with what you saw, there indeed is a minefield. However as prominent my login is visible, I have not seen bruteforce attacks on it like I do on ssh. I suspect it's because they're unsure about the reward.

While I support that you write your own minus avoiding the minefield, people have used public services like "google forms" to do the same. It might be easier and more secure...minus the fact google gets to collect more information about people... Sign Up Genius is another public service that might do what's needed. I do not and hell do not endorse either so I'm not putting in http links to them...
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Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

[Banana]

[Goverp]

Thanks eccerr0r, Banana, I hadn't considered (not sure I was even aware of) Google forms et al. That looks the right path; we're not able to run our own server, and I doubt the provider we use would let us do any server-end processing, at least not without the liberal application of money.
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Greybeard