[SOLVED] masking emails

[glucas3232]

I have a job posting site where I would like to make the email address of the person posting the job anonymous, similar to the way Craigslist offers anonymous emails that forward to the email of record.

I have the Email Module and I'm pretty sure there must be a clever way to handle this, but I am a bit stumped on how to approach (best practice) this issue.

Suggestions?

[Michael Petrov]

Just create a "contact poster" page that goes to emailPoster.php?postId=yourID, find the post, then on that page you present them with a subject/message body form, and make sure to store a hidden form value with the postId. Once you have that the form submits to some other page that looks up the post again and uses the email module to email out the subject/message to the posters email which you retrieve from the record.

Keep in mind that unfortunately this will start sending spam messages to your job posters, since spam bots will pick up your page and will auto submit the subject/message forms. The only way to prevent that is with a "Captcha" which are somewhat complex to implement.

[webko]

Keep in mind that unfortunately this will start sending spam messages to your job posters, since spam bots will pick up your page and will auto submit the subject/message forms. The only way to prevent that is with a "Captcha" which are somewhat complex to implement.

If all of this is behind a login and only able to be accessed by logged in people, then the spambot issue should be much reduced, if not eliminated

[glucas3232]

yes, it is all behind a login. I would prefer to have people just click a masked email link rather than fill out a form and all the coding needed to capture that form. But I don't want people to be able to see the job posters 'real' email address...similar to what craigslist does. Ideas on how to do this?

[Michael Petrov]

It is really not something PHP can do, strictly speaking. If you want an email such as job.positing.12345@yoursite.com to go to the posters email - you will need custom mail server software. It will need to process the incoming mail, and match mailbox patterns - then connect to your database for the real email address and forward the message. Overall it is not something that you can do with PHP for sure (PHP is not a mail server), and I don't know if any mail servers out there offer this feature out of the box.

[glucas3232]

yeah, I am beginning to see the complexity of this and finding a sound approach that does not require form processing.

[webko]

Building a web form that doesn't show the final email address is pretty easy, but having anonymous emails does need the mail server to do the work.

For the web form, you can pass the jobID as a match for the email address for that job post, and remail the form from there.

[glucas3232]

seems the only reasonable approach.