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Contact Form Spam

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Peter Lanky

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Posted March 29, 2009 at 10:54AM

I have a contact form on my website inviting people to enquire about my services. During the last 4 weeks all my spam has been of a similar style. The email address where the spam comes from is almost always in the form John.Smith@gmail.com with the names always being normal rather than silly, though the name of the sender is often silly. The other fields just contain random characters. The message always says "Good site, Admin" or "Good Post, Admin". No trying to link me to porn or sell me drugs or anything with any purpose at all.

Has anyone else experienced this, and if so, what are the aims of the spammer?

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Kemistri

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Posted March 30, 2009 at 2:15PM

@ Peter Lanky. Check to see if the spammer has been dumb enough to leave his referrer intact or use a consistent IP address. Probably not, but they sometimes do. If there is data available and it's consistent, add it to your .htaccess file so that he won't even get as far as your contact form. Not 100%; just a helpful extra tool.

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Peter Lanky

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Posted March 30, 2009 at 2:36PM

Kemistri. How do I do this?

2 other interesting points.

1) I've just had an email from a form that has originated from this forum (somebody testing something?) The result I received is:

This message was sent from:
click here
------------------------------------------------------------
Name of sender: Test
Email of sender: Test@test.com
Telephone Number: 89789789
Referred From: PC Advisor
------------------------- MESSAGE -------------------------

This is a test message



--------------------------------------------------
----------

2) I googled one of the email addresses and found a few web pages that contained them such as:

click here

or

click here

The latter one is interesting as it appears to be a genuine website. The problem is that I don't have the knowledge to take this any further.

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Kemistri

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Posted March 30, 2009 at 5:05PM

Pretty simple.

It looks like you already have access to this kind of data, but if you don't, either check your server logs and do some minor detective work (match times, for example) or, better yet, modify your PHP to include that data in the e-mails that you receive. If you decide to include such hidden data in your e-mails on a permanent basis, you may want to mention it in your data handling policy.

Any usable data that you want to use for blocking purposes can be added to your .htaccess like this: click here (see sections 6 and 7)

I kind of doubt if any members of this forum would have sent you a test e-mail without asking first. Maybe just some random person following the link. Not sure.

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HighTower

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Posted March 31, 2009 at 1:07PM

If you are using Dreamweaver then I believe you just insert the Spry text field into your form and make sure you label it so your web user knows what to do.

You use the Insert / Spry / Spry Validation Text Field and once inserted select it and change the values to whatever you want. In this instance change it to be numeric with a minimum value of 9 and a maximum value of 9.

Pretty simple, but does the job reasonably well without needing to spend too much time tied up in the code.

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