[thelist] Email address masking via HTML or JS?

[Hassan Schroeder]

Janet Green wrote:

> Our organization has several volunteers who would be willing to
> address questions <snip /> but don't necessarily want our website 
> visitors to *know* what their email address is. 

What's the point of masking the address in the page? How are your
volunteers going to *reply* to the messages without revealing their
own addresses?

Dump the mailto and write a server program to accept the form data
and route it to an individual picked from a list of volunteers.
(This will be especially helpful when your volunteer group grows.)

Have the program write the "reply-to" field to point to a simple
CGI redirector program; when the volunteer replies, it goes to the
redirector which processes the headers to eliminate the volunteer's
address, and sends the response out under its own "identity".  

> snip /> I sort of got poo-poo'd by
> the IT manager because of the potential traffic. 

You're serving a half-meg Flash intro page, and your IT manager is
worried about a few text messages?!? Yeah, OK ... :-)

Best of luck!

-- 
H*
Hassan Schroeder ----------------------------- hassan at webtuitive.com 
Webtuitive Design ---(+1) 408-938-0567 --- http://www.webtuitive.com

    -- creating dynamic Web sites and applications since 1994 --