LPM: Regexps for email.

David Hempy hempy at ket.org
Thu Jan 27 13:09:02 CST 2000


At 07:29 PM 1/26/2000 -0500, you wrote:
>Not that this really answers the question, but I'm a little wary of using
>mailto: URL's *anywhere* anymore.  The instant you put an email address on
>a web page as-is is the same instant you get added to a pile of spammer's
>lists.  Most of them use web-crawling bots to harvest addresses.  We've
>got an amusing Apache mod_rewrite + Perl script combo that defeats most of
>them here...
>
>Just something to think about.


Good point, Mike.

On our site (www.dl.ket.org), we make generous use of a web form for
accepting correspondence.  The CGI program that is the action of the form
then generates an email from our server.  

Our goal was to provide reliable communications to us, with contact
information to write back to the user.  Because our students use shared
computers, a mailto: generally will not give us the author's email.
Furthermore, we ran into problems of them not being able to reliably send
email in the first place.  (The latter is less of a problem these days.)

Keeping our addresses private was not a goal, but perhaps a pleasant side
effect.  Our links actually do include the email addresses in plain text,
but this could be garbled or better yet, come from a table in the CGI program.


Food for thought,
-dave


--
David Hempy
Internet Database Administrator
Kentucky Educational Television




More information about the Lexington-pm mailing list