Can anyone tried using an email anonymizer in their communities to keep email addresses of your members private and away from spammers? I want to do what craigslist.org does and have an email address to appear as something like "762900-user-008765" and never let anyone know what the address is. Can anyone point me in the right direction as far as a web site offering this specific tool?

Thanks

Kara

Here is an example of what I want to do:

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Casting Notice for Actor:
We are in search of a male: 20-30, very attractive for lead in feature film.

Email headshot ASAP to:
0988-emailhidden-9813
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I don't want anyone else stealing this casting notice for their casting site. Without the email address, they can't use the casting notice. Craigsist.org does this well.

Greetings,

This would almost certainly involve hacks to work seemlessly, or could be implemented manually with some effort and member moderation.

For instance, do you want a user to have the option of posting their email address (as CL allows), or never allow it? This would require profile field settings and possibly member moderation. Assuming that you don't want the user to ever post their email address, the primary concern would be preventing a cunning & motivated user from doing so anyway via either their display name or in their resume itself. About the only way to have any measure of certainty against this, is to manage it via moderation.

Regardless, next you need a means of allowing proxy email, which definitely requires some 3rd party coding (either a drop in package, or hiring a developer) to work seemlessly.

First a component to generate a random string and a means to maintain an association to the real email address. To do this, it would need to read Groupee Community database tables (which are subject to change, and therefor subsequent failure of this app) and possibly even write back to these tables. The simplest means would be to read the username (hence user email address) of new users and write a string to a custom profile field. Unless you're using something like an md5sum hash, you'd want to also make sure the string isn't already assinged to someone else by doing a lookup. Obviously, with member moderation, you could simply do this manually for all new members, and ease the coding requirements, but either an md5sum or a custom profile field searcher would still need to be employed to prevent duplicates.

Last, you need the actual mail proxy configurator, and lots of available email aliases (or forwarders, I believe Groupee allows unlimited). Again, to do this seemlessly, it would need to use the DA API to add forwards from the randomized string to the real email address. Or, with member moderation, you could simply add them all manually as needed via the DA control panel.

I have to stress at this point, that this is just some ideas to give you an idea of how this might be accomplished. I've certainly never done it, and don't know what kind of pitfalls may be encountered. But a cunning developer under your employ (whether yourself or an outside entity) should be able to make it work seemlessly. If not, a set of procedures should make this possible with some minor configuration to your Groupee Community along with hefty amounts of moderation of your users.

I wouldn't call it a simple project, but it should be doable.

Regards,