As you may be well aware, displaying your e-mail address on your website can lead to e-mail harvesters picking up your address and adding it to hundreds or even thousands of lists used by spammers. If you want to allow your website visitors to contact you, but do not want to publicly display your e-mail address, then a form mailer may be exactly what you are looking for.

What is a form mailer? Quite simply, it is a form that you place on your website, that when filled in and submitted, sends you an e-mail with the contents. Below is an example of a simple form mailer written in PHP - feel free to change the information to that of your own website and make use of it:

[WRITE YOUR HTML HEADER HERE]

<?php

if ($_POST[t] == 'process'){

mail('webmaster@yoursite.tld','Your Site Contact Form Submission',stripslashes($_POST[message]),'FROM:'.$_POST[email]);

echo'<p>Thank you, your message was sent to the webmaster.</p>'."\n";

} else {

echo'<form action="'.$_SERVER[PHP_SELF].'" method="post">'."\n";
echo'<input type="hidden" name="t" value="process"></input>'."\n";

echo'Your E-Mail Address:<br /><input type="text" name="email" size="30" value=""></input><br /><br />'."\n";

echo'Your Message:<br /><textarea name="message" cols="30" rows="8"></textarea><br /><br />'."\n";

echo'<input type="submit" value="Send E-Mail"></input>'."\n";
echo'</form>';

}

?>

[WRITE YOUR HTML FOOTER HERE]

To clarify, copy and paste everything from [WRITE YOUR HTML HEADER HERE] to [WRITE YOUR HTML FOOTER HERE] into a text editor such as Notepad. Make your desired alterations. Save as a file with a .php extension (such as contact.php). Upload to your server and link to the file.

About the author:
Rupe Parnell is the founder and lead developer at Starsol.co.uk, a website development and management firm located in Norfolk, England. Rupe specialises in creating professional grade PHP scripts, a selection of which are available free at http://www.starsol.co.uk/scripts/