Amy, I am chiming in only because I am dealing with the same point you are making. In my case, instead of going through the hassle of building a whole widget just to send an email, I solved it by adding a "Contact Us" link to header of the web app and then went into the main config.json file and added "mailto:<your_email_here>" into the existing "url" property of the "Contact Us" field. Wouldn't this work for you as well?