Using the Pangea email form on web pages

Last revision June 20, 2007

When email addresses are posted on Web sites, they can be picked up by special search engines, popularly known as 'spambots'. These 'bots' collect lists of addresses which are sold to spammers, who send us those endless streams of get-rich-quick schemes, online Viagra ads, and so forth.

We want to make it possible for legitimate users to find our email addresses, so that they can contact us. The pangea web server email form will allow people to find our addresses and to contact users, without exposing our email addresses to spambots.

How to use the form

All you need is your real name and your @stanford.edu email account name, which is either your SUNet ID name, or an email alias name you have created on the StanfordYou account maintenance web page. On your web page, instead of listing your email address, create a link to this URL from your name:

http://pangea.stanford.edu/internal/mailto.php?id=youremailaccountname&name=YourRealName

Substitute your @stanford.edu email account name for yourusername, and substitute your real name for YourName. Note that you do not provide the entire email address, but only the part that comes before the @ sign! It's okay to use spaces in YourName; your browser will replace the spaces with the standard code used for spaces in URLs, %20.

For example, the code

<a href="http://pangea.stanford.edu/internal/mailto.php?id=farrell&name=Phil%20Farrell"> Mail me!</a>

produces a link like this:

Mail me!

The mail form does the rest of the work. Try it out! Use this wherever you would normally put your email address or use a mailto: link on a web page.

Note that this will only work for email addresses on the @stanford.edu servers!

How the form works

The mail form link uses a PHP script to create a mail form web page with your pangea account name. This gets passed to a CGI program which translates your account name into an email address and sends the message.

In addition, some Javascript code writes your email address for viewers with Javascript-enabled browsers to see on the mail form. Spambots are simple programs, and do not implement Javascript, so this method is safe. Browsers without Javascript will see only the mail form.

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