Most contact webforms in reality send email to one or more persons at the
company anyway. The question is that companies do not want to provide
their email addresses on website (harvesting and other reasons) and trust
what has come from their website rather from direct email.
So the problem is in trying to extend trust that vendor see from their
webform to email sender. One such mechanism is to have vendors display to
the users on website email addresses such as
"sales-xxxxx(_at_)domain(_dot_)com"
where xxxxxx corresponds to sessionid of the visitor to their website and
exist for certain small period of time. Because session ids can be unique
and with 8 hex characters there can be more then enough of them to not be
repeated for a long time while the actual email (for example
"sales-18f83a73(_at_)elan(_dot_)net") is not too long to not allow user to
write
it down or copy it over to the mail client software. Relaying on session
ids will also allow to trace those who harvest and immediatly send spam
as you can then look at the logs and see what ip address was responsible.
On Mon, 7 Jul 2003, Kee Hinckley wrote:
At 12:54 AM -0400 7/7/03, Walter Dnes wrote:
I would suggest web-forms for customer contact.
As a customer, I despise them. So as a vendor I'm not likely to want
to rely on them.
Why don't I like them?
- inability to contact multiple vendors in one message
- no record of the message I sent in my outbox
- unable to use them offline
- no easy way to keep vendor contact information in my address book
- repeated information I have to enter every time I converse with the vendor
They put all the convenience on the vendor, and none with the customer.
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