Form that E-mails Me

PHP
1

I am sure this is a pretty dumb question, but how do I make a Form where visitors to my site can e-mail me?

I recall reading in a PHP book a year ago that if you create an HTML Form - and then do whatever - that you can help reduce or eliminate spam. (Not sure if this is true?!)

Not sure where to begin?

Thanks,

Debbie

2

Hello DoubleDee,

What you want to do is to create an outline of the info that you want the user to send you. Code that using html as a form and optionally css to be able to format it later. At the bottom of the form you want to add a routine for a captcha, a box with a code that users fill in to differentiate them from spam bots.

http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=php+form+captcha&oq=php+form+captcha&aq=0&aqi=g2g-v8&aql=&gs_sm=c&gs_upl=884l4030l0l6336l16l14l0l1l1l1l258l2358l1.8.4l13l0

Hope this helps.

3

You might like to look at this article by White hat web design - they have a very good class for captcha image generation and code checking:
http://www.white-hat-web-design.co.uk/blog/php-captcha-security-images/

Also you could consider a validation email being sent to the users email address - that way you can then pull their contact form data from the DB and send it to your own email. If they don’t validate it (say within 7 days) then a cron could wipe it automatically (or you could send them a reminder to validate). Spammers don’t tend to validate things sent to them by email so that should drastically filter any spam sent through your form should your captcha image be cracked.