Still a newbie... had a small question about setting up a 'contact form' for my Contact Us Page. If I create a page within my site with a contact form - one of the tabs obviously needs a 'reply to email'. Now if that person types in a fake return email or accidently mispells his email, would there be a way to check this before I *waste* my time replying to his question? If not is there a way around this?
The only way to have the user confirm their email address prior to form submission is to have them enter it 2x... Then use valiation to match the fields. No way to stop fake emails though. Only the ability to have the user confirm, or double check, their own declared email address.
Hmm, little confused. Your contact form are you sending the info to an email address? I dont get what you mean by reply to email tab, surely you would simpley reply via your email client? But you could always get them to enter their email address twice and use validation to make sure there was less chance of getting the wrong email address sent to you. Great validation tutorials. http://www.devshed.com/c/a/PHP/Email-Validation-PHP-Script-with-JavaScript-and-User-Verification/ http://www.the-art-of-web.com/javascript/validate-password/
You could make it so that the email is on hold on server until the user clicks a confirmation link in an email sent by your server... I don't usually get this problem because my replies are short, don't care if they reach lol
What about this: Would anyone find it unprofessional if the contact page of a website didn't have a proper contact form but the email address written as "support [at] domain.com" ...to prevent spam issues?
to avoid spam use CAPTCHA. Any other method is almost certain to be recognized and foiled by spam bots. Believe me. Been there.
I use a contact link on all of my pages mailto:youraddresshere@mail.com It eliminates the spam problem and no user has ever complained. I seem to get all the important contacts I need and none of the junk.
actually it eliminates nothing and will not prevent spam. CAPTCHA is a PROVEN technique that works. None of these other suggestions do anything to combat spam
This website has a clever way of dealing with spam - it uses a non-clickable image for it's email address... http://www.truthaboutabs.com/Contact.html And to stop spam even further, just avoid the general terms like support@, contact@, admin@ or info@ and create something unique. ...my only concern is that it looks a little unprofessional.