How to implement mailing server with Next.js?

Question

I am pretty new to Next.js and I want to implement a mailing feature for a contact form which I have on the site. Since Next.js is SSR, if we need to use a mailer I wonder: do we still need to have a separate backend environment where we then need to install the mailer (for example Node.js and Nodemailer) or we can install the mailer (for example Nodemailer) directly into the Next.js setup?

I know there is an option for having separate Node.js server, proving an API endpoint and using this endpoint for triggering the method where we will send emails (and probably send all the values from the contact form as a parameters in the endpoint), but I wonder if the Next.js allows direct implementation of a mailer nested directly into it's setup.

Answer 1

Next.js allows for creating custom API routes right within the project.

Here are the Docs: https://nextjs.org/docs/api-routes/introduction

You need to create files in pages/api and the endpoint will be mapped to /api/*