[RESOLVED] Clickable Email

joe69

Good evening
I am working on a display page for some members of a club. I can pull all info from the database and display it. The following is just a snippit of the code, Where the email line is....... How do I make that so that when the see the members all displayed they can click on that if they so chose and send an email

echo "<TR bgcolor=$row_color>";
echo "<TD>".$row['firstname'].' '.$row['lastname']."</TD>";
echo "<TD>".$row['address']."</TD>";
echo "<TD>".$row['city']."</TD>";
echo "<TD>".$row['phone']."</TD>";
echo "<TD>".$row['cell']."</TD>";
echo "<TD>".$row['email']."</TD>";
echo "</TR>";

Thanks
Joe

Pikachu2000

echo "<TD><a href=mailto:" . $row['email'] . ">Email this person</a></TD>";

would be one way to do it, but it exposes the email addresses to spambots. The better way to do it would be to use a form.

joe69

ok me being really new and stupid..... how does a form keep it from being exposed to spambots? and do you mean just make up a regular form to display all the info or is there someother "form" you are talking about

Thanks
Joe
right now this stuff is all offline I havent put it on the server yet. I added the code you proposed and it worked flawlessly!!

Pikachu2000

joe69;10887483 wrote:
ok me being really new and stupid..... how does a form keep it from being exposed to spambots? and do you mean just make up a regular form to display all the info or is there someother "form" you are talking about

Thanks
Joe
right now this stuff is all offline I havent put it on the server yet. I added the code you proposed and it worked flawlessly!!

You could simply use "Email this person" as a link to another php form that would pull the relevant data from the database allowing the user to enter their message, and when they click Send, the server sends the email via php's mail(). Many hosting providers stick a default mail form in each site directory that can be customized to your needs. Using a form, the users' email address aren't output in HTML, thus eliminating email address address harvesting.

There are, however, more bots that use forms to spam people. You can minimize that problem by utilizing Captcha image verification in the form. There is no 100% safe way (that I've ever heard of, anyhow) to allow email to be sent from a web site, but there are ways to lessen the possibility of abuse. Form field validation is always a good idea, too.