[thelist] Protecting sender's email addy

Deacon B web at master.gen.in.us
Tue Mar 13 15:17:36 CST 2001


On 13 Mar 2001, at 9:14, Janet Green wrote:

> Hi all, can someone please tell me how to help a group of people mask their
> email addresses? Is it a whole separate program, or maybe a function of the
> email client itself that accomplishes this? I have a group of 20 volunteers
> who have agreed to act as mentors on behalf of our organization, and provide
> information about their careers if our website visitors send them an email,
> but they asked about the possibility of protecting their personal email
> addresses. My caveat to them was this: If you each are going to send out an
> email from your own home computer, you *each* are going to need some sort of
> email masking software to protect your addy. I may have been wrong... LOL -
> yes, that's happened before - but wanted to get some input from this group.

Some ISPs will not allow you to use any email address but your own;
their SMTP blocks it. Seems to me that I tried out a 30 days free deal
with GTE a year or two ago, and decided after three days that they were
unusable.

One of the many features of Pegasus is that it allows me to easily
morph between different identities. A drop-down box allows me to 
change from <a>, where I use a particular combination of SMTP,
POP, and return address, to <b>, <c>, or <d>, where I use other
combinations.  

I do *not* recommend this kind of solution if you want to remain 
anonymous, though; too often someone writes to 
webmaster at oneofmydomains and I end up replying as 
webmaster at anotherdomain  

People forget to check their web mail, though. 

I think the *best* solution would be to assign aliases to all these
people, and filter their mail into one POP3. On the server, you'd
set up a cron to check the POP3 on a regular basis, and when 
there was an incoming mail, you'd convert it to a web page with
a form so that you could reply to the email via sendmail - and you'd
immediately send the volunteer the URL to go to.  Once a week or
so, you could send reminders that there is undealt-with mail....

I've never seen anything like that in cgi-resources.com or any of the
other script repositories, and I have a similar problem, so I'm gonna 
have to write something like that before the end of the year. Yuck!

deke





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