Multipart autoresponder

[Scott]

How do I configure cpanel to send a multipart autoresponder? It appears that the autoresponse can only be one or the other (plain text, html).

Thanks in advance.

[Matt]

You'd probably have to pipe it to a PHP or perl script that handles the processing, then send off the response via sendmail.

I don't think the cPanel built in autoresponder handles multipart. I'll see if that has changed recently though.

But give me an example of your goals....

[Scott]

I have an email address of info@ and I would like to configure it in such a way that when this email address receives an email that a multipart autoresponse email is sent out.

I can handle this operation when the visitor uses the contact form. However, I do display info@ in plain view on the website and would like to achieve the same result as if they had used the contact form.

PS ... your response time to these posts is ridiculously fast.

[Matt]

Well if you want my honest opinion (and even if you don't) I think its a bad idea because:

1. You will waste server CPU
2. You will waste your bandwidth

Because:

Every spambot on the interweb that finds that address on your page or simply guesses that extrememly common domain prefix will be getting a copy each time they bombard you with a piece of junkmail.

Forms are really to only sensible way these days to get preliminary contacts or leads from your web site IMHO, and once they are internal that is when email once again becomes a useful communication tool.

But yes, if you must the way to do that would be to setup a mail filter to pipe all inbound email to a scripts, then do what you want with it from there.

[Scott]

Originally Posted by Matt

Every spambot on the interweb that finds that address on your page or simply guesses that extrememly common domain prefix will be getting a copy each time they bombard you with a piece of junkmail.

I hear you. I have taken the precaution to fight this a little by encoding the email address like this:

PHP Code:

<a href="mailto:info@allmartech.com">info@allmartech.com</a> 


Now this doesn't address the guess but just curious if you have any insight if the above technique works?

[Scott]

Well that didn't work too well. Anywho, I use character codes inbetween the <a> tag and in the Href attribute.

[jmarcv]

This works

http://minitutorials.com/webdesign/j...t/mailto.shtml

[Matt]

You can try to obfuscate your email addresses in your code all day long but a good parser script (like these forums as you can see in your php code example) is going to be able to extrapolate the email address no matter what you try to do to mask it.

And the other problem is emails like

info@
support@
sales@

Are used by nearly every sites on the planet, and spammers know this. They go out to WHOIS and query for recently registered domain names, like new-domain.com and add it to their list of domains then start adding prefixes like those above to new-domain.com

They are getting so advanced these days that simple de-obfuscation is easy.

Even this bulletin board was getting automated bot spam for a while there until they came out with a Captcha code requirement for unregistered users who were trying to post in forums that allowed unregistered posting.

It basically has stopped spam on these boards with the exception of those who actually take time to register, spamvertise, then find themselves banned 5 minutes later with their posts removed.

So if you must have public email addresses on the site I recommend not making those the email addresses associated with sending off the autoresponder, and having a Captcha requirement on the forms that handle the mutipart processing.

You could also do a regular autoreponder that has a link to the download, or again use the email pipe to do what you are talking about though it's probably not a good idea for your transfer or the server as a whole and has potential for abuse.

Another suggestion if you want to do a mutipart autoresponder is some sort of human verification like making them login, or cpatch verify or some other validation to get the "uncommon" email address that will handle the response.

Even a "type this word into the box to gain access" would probaly work great seeing as it is a custom script the chances of a spammer sitting there and specifically coding a bot for one website is extremely low.