email forwarding like craigslist
Hello,
I am not sure if this is posted in the correct topic. Let me know if there would be a better place for this.
I am working on a web application. I want users to have an automatically generated email address that other users write to and gets forwarded to the original users real email address. exactly as it as done on craigslist.
Can someone point me into the right direction as to what I should start googling? or software or code that may be of some help.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Matt
[562 byte] By [
msf145] at [2007-11-20 4:13:48]
# 1 Re: email forwarding like craigslist
I don't know much about craigslist, but I am a web application developer. I have written a couple of mailing applications and I like to use MySQL with PHP to handle mass lists. You can even program in a way to hide the true e-mail address from the user.
Can you explain how craigslist works?
# 2 Re: email forwarding like craigslist
yes, i should not have made that assumption that everyone knows.
craigslist allows you to post things for sale somewhat anonymously.
for example:
when posting the description of your item for sale, craiglists asks for your email address. However when it is listed for sale, the email address is listed as:
[some random letter and number sequence]@criagslist.com.
When a user wants to inquire about the item, they send an email to that random email address. craigslist must handle it somehow and forward it to the seller's real email address. from then on, if the seller choose to respond to the inquiry, the user's real email address will obviously show.
how is it down with mysql and php? is this what you do with it?
thanks, matt
msf145 at 2007-11-9 12:19:40 >
# 3 Re: email forwarding like craigslist
MySQL is a database that PHP can interact with by sending queries. For example, you might have a table named users. You could display a fake email address and then process it with the real one.
MySQL query example using PHP.
<?php
// mysql query
$sql = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM `users` WHERE `id` = '1073'");
// grab the information to an associative array
$info = mysql_fetch_assoc($sql);
// read from the array with the index of "email"
$real_email = $info['email'];
?>
