Where can I find a good tell-a-friend referral script?

Let's look more closely at the idea, first. The current state of spam and email delivery has killed much of the utility of referral forms.

Referral scripts are notoriously easy to exploit. Even when they are used by "real" people to send messages to their friends, they are still sending unsolicited email that the receipient did not request - that makes it real spam. It often gets reported as spam to ISPs like AOL and gmail, leading to them block or spam-folder ALL email from your domain or IP.

What are you trying to achieve with the form? If you want to collect new addresses for marketing, this is a bad way, since you don't have the permission of the recipient to email them again (you didn't even have their permission the first time).

If you truly believe that site visitors need help telling their friends about you, an alternative is to offer to send them something to forward to their personal email lists. Let them sign up for a white paper, or a newsletter, or some other resource feed they can blog about or forward by email. Or add a member sign-up that lets them receive notices about events, discounts, member-only articles, or genuine on-topic news that they will want to send to their friends on their own. Don't use an autoresponder for white paper delivery - use a sign-up script (see HotScripts.com for examples) that collects the email addresses neatly, records the request, lets them opt in to a newsletter, and lets you follow up.

If you install a script for either sign-up or a referral form - or ANY form these days - make sure it has a graphic validation feature that makes the user enter random characters from an image at the bottom of the form - I am sure you have seen examples of that. Use only recently developed or updated scripts that are more likely to have enhanced security features.

Also, make sure the form sends the email honestly from a real POP3 account on your domain, rather than spoofing the address of the referrer - that will get much of your email blocked before it goes anywhere at all. Also, by using your own 'from' address, you will receive the bounces and abuse reports, so you can quickly see if your form is being exploited or your email blocked.

But don't rely on those security features:

Real example: A regional candidate for office had a referral form that let supporters send a campaign platform message to their friends. But the opposing candidate had a fleet of volunteers exploit the form by manually sending thousands of individual referral messages to AOL addresses, using the voter data list of the opposing party - so they were promptly reported as spam, leading AOL to block the entire server. Lots of consumers (and voters, and campaign volunteers) are AOL users, so that hurt everyone on the server. Ouch.

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