What is the best way to implement a petition? (email send after signing the petition)

Question

I need to build a little webapp but I'm not sure what is the best thing to do.

A person that subscribe the petition is signing an email sent to X. This will be also saved to a db in order to show online who subscribed.

The idea is to have a standard text message, the user submit his name and that name goes into the message as signature.

I could make php send the email with the address of the real sender, or let the user copy and paste the text and let him send the email on his own.

I'm not sure of what is the best way to implement it. What will be more "effective", I mean as number of subscribers the solution where the app send the email is easier, but what about the authenticity of the emails? They could be considered not valid if sent all from the same place?

Answer 1

Let me get this straight - so you want to add to the flood of armchair activism email that is already saturating the world to no good purpose, and you're asking how best to do it? I would read the following before going any further with this:

http://www.breakthechain.org/armchair.html

Answer 2

Regardless of the whole thing being a "good" idea or not, you want to keep yourself safe. If you spoof the from field, chances are most of your email (especially for domains with SPF records) will not make it through the first level of spam filtering.

A SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record lists the only IPs that are allowed to send mails for a domain. If a domain has a SPF record and you poll it, you're supposed to treat anything that didn't originate from a listed server as hazardous waste.

Depending on where you're sending these emails, you'll probably end up with your mail server on one or multiple blacklists. That means any email, SPF or not just won't get accepted.

So in short:

• Get people to send their own email. Provide templates.
• Consider utilizing the full specs for <a href="mailto:... -- you can put the subject and body in the link, allowing templates to be a one-click affair.
• You could use Javascript on your site to personalise the message (and therefore mailto: link) while still on your site.