FORM SPAM - Get help dealing with it

FORM SPAM - Get help dealing with it

One of the most aggressive types of email spam is delivered through your website forms. SpamBots target website forms and automatically fill in your form and send the spam message to you via that form.

Googles recaptcha can give you some amount of protection against this automated spam delivery system, however SpamBots have figured out to get around Googles recaptcha.

One of these SpamBots has been targeting our websites forms and sending form returns constantly. We get 20 to 50 of these emails daily. Here is what the spam looks like:

 

The following error occurred: missing_fields Error=The form required some values that you did not seem to provide. data-sitekey i.r.radiate.ia.j.i@gmail.com Crytobak FullName: 'Crytobak' Mobile: '89036920897' EmailAddr: 'i.r.radiate.ia.j.i@gmail.com' Website: 'Telegram - @Cryptaxbot' Message: 'Just one click can turn you dollar into $1000. Telegram - @Cryptaxbot' submit: '' User IP address was 37.139.53.82 User agent was Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/83.0.4099.2 Safari/537.36

 

Fortunately we have very strong spam protection and these form spam emails cause a error and are routed to our spam email box and marked 'read'. The only spam that gets through would be one that a human actually keys in the form fields.

So, how do we do it? We us a very good php form processor, then we use captcha that requires a picture puzzle to be solved each and every time.

We also use a email address mangler that makes our email address wrong to SpamBots.

SpamBots are programs that scrap your website for email addresses. Typically, they look for "mailto:someone@somewhere", and some are smart enough to look inside the fields of HTML forms.

PROS: *SpamBots can not get through our spam protection. *You receive only the valid form returns. *Your email box does not fill up with form spam. *Your email address is not exposed to email collection SpamBots.

CONS: *Every human who fills in the form must solve the picture puzzle.

NOTE: No Spam Forms require knowledge of HTML and PHP.

In a future email we will go in depth on the subject of stopping form spam.