Receiving email on your website without giving out your address?

[pelikan]

I get hundreds of emails with viruses every day. Right now visitors to my website can click "contact" and its an email hyperlink - so they get my email address. I want to use a form or some other method that allows me to receive email from visitors without giving out my email address.
What is the easiest way to do this? Any help is greatly appreciated. My website is a nonprofit.

 

[jonmullen]

do you have any sort of server side scripting...aka php, per, asp, asp.net,jsp, coldfusion. any of those would allow for what you want. But more info is needed for more help. There is however an easier option. It is not quite what you were looking for, but should solve alot of your problems. Most of the spamers get emails from pages by spidering them looking for <a href="mailto:blah@blah.com"> so one way to get around that is to not put the link in your page like that, but rather have javascript form the link when ppl look at your page in a browser. The code for that would look like this:

 

[pelikan]

Cool. That works. Thanks.
How about for an image that I use as a button for an email hyperlink? Can I a similar java script for that?

 

[pelikan]

bump

 

[DaveSimmons]

just change "Link text" to
<img src=\"WHEREVER-IT-IS\" alt=\"Send me mail, me likes it!\">

 

[pelikan]

Thanks a lot!

 

[Mitzi]

Another alternative if you can run Perl scripts on your site is FormMail, although it takes a little bit more setting up IMO it's a better alternative than JavaScript. I use it on my site here.

 

[beer]

Javascript still isn't ideal because spam crawlers that serach for emails in your source code can dig it out. To be truly effective you'll need some sort of server-side email scripting. You'l likely have to change your email address as well if you want to stop getting the spam/viruses you already are getting.

 

[episodic]

Another easy solution would be to consider using a forum or guestbook, again requiring SS scripting

 

[LiLithTecH]

This may be of help also.

The Enkoder

 

[jfall]

Originally posted by: Mitzi
Another alternative if you can run Perl scripts on your site is FormMail, although it takes a little bit more setting up IMO it's a better alternative than JavaScript. I use it on my site here.

Agreed. With FormMail, you can set your recipient as an alias, then define the alias in your FormMail configuration, this prevents bots from harvesting your real e-mail address

 

[pelikan]

This is great. There sure are a lot of knowledgable people here. I'll check to see if I can run Perl scripts.

 

[jfall]

What kind of control panel software is your host using? Pretty much all hosting servers have a formmail script that can be used.

 

[NightCrawler]

I've been using this as the Final Solution: http://www.whois.sc/info/webmasters/email-protection.html

It blocks the spiders cold. Only people who are really interested will email you.

 

[pelikan]

Originally posted by: NightCrawler
I've been using this as the Final Solution: http://www.whois.sc/info/webmasters/email-protection.html

It blocks the spiders cold. Only people who are really interested will email you.

I like this idea. I don't understand how to use it though. Can you clue me in? Thanks.

 

[NightCrawler]

Originally posted by: pelikan

Originally posted by: NightCrawler
I've been using this as the Final Solution: http://www.whois.sc/info/webmasters/email-protection.html

It blocks the spiders cold. Only people who are really interested will email you.

I like this idea. I don't understand how to use it though. Can you clue me in? Thanks.

Basically just put your desired email in the box on that page such as webmaster@pelikan.com then it will spit out code looking like this:



you take the code and put it on your webpage probably at the bottom, that's all there is to it.

 

[pelikan]

Since it turns out my server doesn't support scrips unless I upgrade my account I decided to use the java script. Its working so far...
If I start getting spammed again I'll upgrade my account and use a FormMail.
Thanks for all the help.

 

[AFB]

Here is a php class file I made for sending mail. It makes it much more simple.