Hi
Very often when you wish to contact a company, their web site features a 'contact us' link. This often leads to a form you fill in & click to send.
Problem is, you can't request a 'read receipt and there is no copy in your sent items box.
I know that 'sales', 'info' etc @ the web address often work, but how reliable is this?
Is there a way to absolutely identify a kosher e-mail address from a link to a form?
It depends on the way the form handler on the web server is set up. If you look at the HTML source code of the page you might see a hidden recipient field that suggests an email address, but most 'proper' web servers would be set up to prevent people either harvesting the email address for spam, or spoofing the email addresses to use the web server to send spam.
So probably not.
(Unless it's the local synagogue website, in which case you can be reasonably sure all the email addresses are kosher.)
Owain
Very drole ;-)
In message , The Medway Handyman writes
Never seen much point in them anyway. All it tells you is someone opended the email. It doesn't tell you that no one read the email, as lack of one probably means that the system is set up not to send one.
Very unreliable I'd have thought.
No, certainly if it's done properly I wouldn't expect the email address to be in the page code, it would be dealt with by the server once the form has been sent back to it.
This frequently does not work anyway (many people will have their mail software set to automatically refuse to generate receipts)
Not very - "postmaster" should work, but you can't count on that wither these days.
Not usually. Most of these will pass the data entered on the form to a server side script or application via the Common Gateway Interface (CGI). The generation of the real email and the addition of a real address[1] would then be done by the server side application that you are not able to see[2].
[1] More sophisticated systems may not generate an email at all - and will instead post an entry to the companies CRM or content management application ready to be picked up by the next available rep. [2] Perl scripts are a common way of receiving the form data via CGI and then generating a real email from it. These ought to be on directory on the web server that is not readable by the public. However sometimes they are not. Hence you *may* be able to get some information by looking at the page source of the "contact us" page, to see the name of the form handler used with the forms "post" tag. Say it was something like "cgi\formmail.pl", you may find that posting that at the end of the site URL in your browser will yield the Perl source code and hence the embedded email address. Note that if it is set up correctly then it should *not* work!
You can never guarantee this to work. Try sending email to me (email address is valid) with whatever tricks & traps you might have (including embedding invisible graphics from a web site with log-file anlysers) and see what you get...
Although I echo your sentiments about not having a local copy though.
Gordon
I *always* copy the full text of the message from the web form into a draft e-mail, together with the name of the company I'm sending it to in the "To" field. This copy comes in handy when I click on "Submit" in the web form and the server process crashes - I can send it again without having to try to remember what I said the first time. Also the draft hanging around in my mail client acts as a reminder that I ought to be receiving a reply. I suppose it would be possible to actually *send* the message (to a presumably invalid but informative address) in order to have a permanent record in my mailbase, but I don't, I usually delete the draft when I receive a reply.
On balance I agree with your unspoken assertion that it would be a lot better if the companies just provided real e-mail addresses. Unfortunately the spammers like those as well.
There is absolutely not, which is the intention, as people who published e-mail addresses that could be decoded by robots or ingenious humans, found those mailboxes rapidly full of junk, and useless for business purposes.
I was called upon once to track and trace a 'mail bomber' who had a dispute with a well known hight street purveyor of electrical goods..he simply smashed their corporate sales enquiry mailbox (published on their website) to pieces, with thousands of randomly generated relatively obsene e-mails.
Sadly for him, but happily for us, he wasn't that good and we managed to identify him..we were able to charge the tight fisted bastards involved lots of money for tracking him down.
This is just not true - we include email addresses, complete with mailto: links on all our sites. Sure, we get some spam, but our spam filter takes care of most of it. Some of the sites in question are very high traffic, high ranking sites.
The convenience far outweighs the slightly irksome spam.
If one includes the mailto: link, but uses a little bit of html character coding to replace some of the characters so that it is no longer easy to search for as a text string or reg exp, it seems to be very effective at reducing the ability of robots to scrape it (most don't seem to render the html - only parse the plain text).
Well all I can say is you guys must be lowly enough to not be bothered.
I have a mail address that is listed with a few organizations of the internet registration sort, and used it briefly on usenet a few years ago..silly me.
I get around 100 spams a day according to my spam filters - now so tight that 97% is rejected ..
And I am only an individual..
I'm not even going to go there...
Usenet - that's the key here. My snipped-for-privacy@ixxa.com address gets vast amounts of spam; far more than addresses which are linked to from live sites.
100 *a day*?? Wow. My personal accounts alone get over 10x that.Bring em on, I say ;-)
I would tend to agree. We have some customers who had posted unprotected email addresses on their web sites in the past. They now cop for something like 600 - 1000 emails a *day* as a result. Using the simple obfuscation I mention above on our own site has limited our exposure to under five a day from that source... (an old demon address I still have that was used unprotected on usenet for a few years starting in the mid
90's, cops significantly more alas - and I have not even used that this decade!)
Blimey, we're bouncing 12,000,000 a day at work. (No, that's not a typo or an error. 12 million.)
Since Demon implemented Brightmail I get 3 or 4 a day, so little that I stopped maintaining my spam filters...
Is that all, for my necessarily public email box for web registrations etc the current score today is real mail: 2, spam mail: 1362. Yes, the filter removes most of it, and a lot dosn't get that far now I no longer use a catch all address.
John Rumm wrote
I bought my own 'vanity' domain back in '93 from a domain re-seller. The previous owner (Mike by name) had obviously been incautious with his address, because I got a steady stream of spam intended for him. I have never replied to any of that spam and, in addition, for years now, that mike@ address has been bounced with a 550 'No such user'.
It's been a dozen or so years since that email address died, and yet every time I check the logs, I *still* see 30 or 40 attempts a day to reach him.
Once an email address is 'out there', it *never* stops.
Not the original question, but it seems like the e-mail address on my website will attract spam then?
How would I do that "little bit of html character coding to replace some of the characters so that it is no longer easy to search for as a text string or reg exp" thingy - and what does it actually mean :-)
What the others have said, plus....
on the end of an email form I always put something like "please send me a copy of this email form for my records". A few do have the decency to do that anyway, and even fewer note on their page that they will send you a copy.
What really gets up my nose is when they send an automated reply thanking you for saying something without telling you what. Grrrrr!!!
Phil
Replace the normal characters in your mailto: link with the &#... codes in the link below:
I've gone the whole hog and even replaced the mailto: bit :o)
Alan
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