My Contact Station - One Answer to the Spam Problem?
One problem facing anyone with a website, writer or otherwise, is how to provide a method for people to contact you.
Of course, you can publish your email address on your site. The trouble is that as soon as you do this you become prey to spammers, who use special software to trawl the net and automatically find and save any email addresses they come across. You will then find yourself getting torrents of spam messages pushing everything from share tips to cut-price pharmaceuticals.
One possible solution - which I have used for a while - is to get a disposable email address from a service such as Sneakemail. Any emails sent here are then automatically forwarded to your actual email address. Of course, if you publish this address on your website it will soon start getting spammed as well, but once this gets too bad you can simply "retire" the disposable address you've been using and get a new one.
That's one solution, but it's not a perfect one. For one thing, every time you change your disposable email address, you have to go through all the web pages where you used the old address and substitute your new one. And second - as has been pointed out to me - quoting your address as drfgtly142k@sneakemail.com or whatever on your website doesn't look very professional.
I recently discovered a much better solution to this problem. It's a program called My Contact Station. Once it's installed, if someone clicks on your Contact Me link (or whatever you choose to call it) a snazzy-looking box opens in which your visitor is invited to enter his or her message. The message is then forwarded to your normal email address, without your visitor (or anyone else on the web) ever seeing this.
I'm now using My Contact Station on my homepage at http://www.nickdaws.co.uk/, so if you go there and click on Contact Me (directly under Site Last Updated...) you can try it out for yourself. Or here's a screengrab of the MCS dialog box, if you just want to see what one looks like...
As you'll see from this, before anyone can send you a message, they have to provide the answer to a mathematical formula or copy a series of 'CAPTCHA' characters (your choice, though not all hosts support the CAPTCHA option). This should help to ensure that only human beings, not spam programs, can use the form to send you messages. The software also provides visitors with the option to submit anonymous feedback, if you choose to enable this feature.
My Contact Station is provided as a compressed zip file. The way it works is that you edit a couple of the files contained in the zip using a program such as Notepad (provided free with Windows), following the step-by-step instructions provided. You then upload the whole MCS folder to your website using your favourite FTP program. Finally, you enter a line of code on your web page anywhere you want the "contact me" facility to appear. I'm no techie, but I managed to get it set up in an hour or so without any major problems (and no need to contact the helpdesk!).
My Contact Station works on most websites. Technically speaking, your host will need to have PHP and SENDMAIL enabled (all but the very cheapest hosting solutions offer this). To use the CAPTCHA feature, you will need GD Support with Freetype enabled. To see if you have these features or not, the README file provided with the software includes a link to a test file you can upload to your domain. If you view it in your browser, it should then tell you whether these features are enabled for your domain.
The best thing about My Contact Station, however, is the price. It's just $7, or around 3.50 UK Pounds. There is a more expensive premium version with more bells and whistles, but I didn't see any need to buy this, and unless you run dozens of websites you probably won't either. And finally, as you may have guessed, it's another of those Seven Dollar Secrets products where, once you've bought it, you can sell copies yourself as an affiliate and keep 100% of the profits!
OK, this product is only going to be of interest to you if you have a website, but if you do, and you need a better method for allowing people to contact you, it's well worth looking into. If you've ever edited a web page and used an FTP program, you should be able to manage the technical aspects, but there is also an optional installation service (costing $25) which will take care of this for you if required.
And incidentally, you only have to install the script once to one site. You can then use it from any web page and website that you like.
All in all, My Contact Station is a neat little product, and one I am very happy to recommend to others.
Of course, you can publish your email address on your site. The trouble is that as soon as you do this you become prey to spammers, who use special software to trawl the net and automatically find and save any email addresses they come across. You will then find yourself getting torrents of spam messages pushing everything from share tips to cut-price pharmaceuticals.
One possible solution - which I have used for a while - is to get a disposable email address from a service such as Sneakemail. Any emails sent here are then automatically forwarded to your actual email address. Of course, if you publish this address on your website it will soon start getting spammed as well, but once this gets too bad you can simply "retire" the disposable address you've been using and get a new one.
That's one solution, but it's not a perfect one. For one thing, every time you change your disposable email address, you have to go through all the web pages where you used the old address and substitute your new one. And second - as has been pointed out to me - quoting your address as drfgtly142k@sneakemail.com or whatever on your website doesn't look very professional.
I recently discovered a much better solution to this problem. It's a program called My Contact Station. Once it's installed, if someone clicks on your Contact Me link (or whatever you choose to call it) a snazzy-looking box opens in which your visitor is invited to enter his or her message. The message is then forwarded to your normal email address, without your visitor (or anyone else on the web) ever seeing this.
I'm now using My Contact Station on my homepage at http://www.nickdaws.co.uk/, so if you go there and click on Contact Me (directly under Site Last Updated...) you can try it out for yourself. Or here's a screengrab of the MCS dialog box, if you just want to see what one looks like...
As you'll see from this, before anyone can send you a message, they have to provide the answer to a mathematical formula or copy a series of 'CAPTCHA' characters (your choice, though not all hosts support the CAPTCHA option). This should help to ensure that only human beings, not spam programs, can use the form to send you messages. The software also provides visitors with the option to submit anonymous feedback, if you choose to enable this feature.My Contact Station is provided as a compressed zip file. The way it works is that you edit a couple of the files contained in the zip using a program such as Notepad (provided free with Windows), following the step-by-step instructions provided. You then upload the whole MCS folder to your website using your favourite FTP program. Finally, you enter a line of code on your web page anywhere you want the "contact me" facility to appear. I'm no techie, but I managed to get it set up in an hour or so without any major problems (and no need to contact the helpdesk!).
My Contact Station works on most websites. Technically speaking, your host will need to have PHP and SENDMAIL enabled (all but the very cheapest hosting solutions offer this). To use the CAPTCHA feature, you will need GD Support with Freetype enabled. To see if you have these features or not, the README file provided with the software includes a link to a test file you can upload to your domain. If you view it in your browser, it should then tell you whether these features are enabled for your domain.
The best thing about My Contact Station, however, is the price. It's just $7, or around 3.50 UK Pounds. There is a more expensive premium version with more bells and whistles, but I didn't see any need to buy this, and unless you run dozens of websites you probably won't either. And finally, as you may have guessed, it's another of those Seven Dollar Secrets products where, once you've bought it, you can sell copies yourself as an affiliate and keep 100% of the profits!
OK, this product is only going to be of interest to you if you have a website, but if you do, and you need a better method for allowing people to contact you, it's well worth looking into. If you've ever edited a web page and used an FTP program, you should be able to manage the technical aspects, but there is also an optional installation service (costing $25) which will take care of this for you if required.
And incidentally, you only have to install the script once to one site. You can then use it from any web page and website that you like.
All in all, My Contact Station is a neat little product, and one I am very happy to recommend to others.
Nick at 11:46 AM
1 Comments:
Wow..this is kinda cool. Could it be the solution we've all been looking for?
Brian
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