how can I block spam emails coming from contact pages?

7 replies
On my website here About Us | EHP Solar Panels Donegal | ehpsolar.ie there is a "request a quote form" form in the widget area of most pages. I seem to be getting a lot of weird spam emails through this. Are there any way of blocking these?

Also when My emails come through in the name area in my inbox it just comes up as "unknown sender" or "wordpress"

How can I set it so that the persons name appears instead?

I am using contact form 7
#block #coming #contact #emails #pages #spam
  • Profile picture of the author Joey Starkey
    Contact Form & has a add on for a captcha code...it is free and easy to add.

    Just search for it under plugins.

    Should fix most of your problems.
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  • Profile picture of the author Sarevok
    Originally Posted by seanpbh View Post

    On my website here About Us | EHP Solar Panels Donegal | ehpsolar.ie there is a "request a quote form" form in the widget area of most pages. I seem to be getting a lot of weird spam emails through this. Are there any way of blocking these?

    Also when My emails come through in the name area in my inbox it just comes up as "unknown sender" or "wordpress"

    How can I set it so that the persons name appears instead?

    I am using contact form 7
    As someone already mentioned use Captcha plugin, or look into getting akismnet
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  • Profile picture of the author wuser12
    Hi,

    To avoid being spammed you should use captcha service. Find more in Get reCAPTCHA. Follow this link and you will find lot of information.
    Forms without captcha are easily spammed as there is no way to control whether the sender is human or a bot.
    Bots cannot overcome captcha, only a human can decode the text or image inside captcha.
    Please make sure you get captcha in your request form right now.

    Hope this help
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  • Profile picture of the author sunray
    They tend to pass through easier captchas, and if you make it too hard your visitors won't be able to post either.
    One solution is to put your traffic through cloudflare.com service. It has a serious drawback on shared hosting though. If you do not have your own server (VPS would do), you cannot put in place the mod they give, and you do not see any of your visitor IP addrsses any more (you only see Cloudflare IP-s). If you can live with that, use them. They know the spammers and block them even reaching your site. Additionally you can block visitors by country and so on.

    Another option is Mollom service. They only step in when a comment is being posted. If its content or the poster's IP matches spammers' patterns they either block, or (if the pattern is not so obvious) present a captcha.

    Both these options have free plans available, and usually the free version will do just fine.
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    • Profile picture of the author rhinocl
      Mollom is missing a lot of spammers for me. Possibly because I'm using the free version and I have it set to allow commenting if their servers are too busy. Either that or id doesn't integrate properly with Contact Form 7 anymore?
      Originally Posted by sunray View Post

      They tend to pass through easier captchas, and if you make it too hard your visitors won't be able to post either.
      One solution is to put your traffic through cloudflare.com service. It has a serious drawback on shared hosting though. If you do not have your own server (VPS would do), you cannot put in place the mod they give, and you do not see any of your visitor IP addrsses any more (you only see Cloudflare IP-s). If you can live with that, use them. They know the spammers and block them even reaching your site. Additionally you can block visitors by country and so on.

      Another option is Mollom service. They only step in when a comment is being posted. If its content or the poster's IP matches spammers' patterns they either block, or (if the pattern is not so obvious) present a captcha.

      Both these options have free plans available, and usually the free version will do just fine.
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    • Profile picture of the author damoncloudflare
      "t has a serious drawback on shared hosting though. If you do not have your own server (VPS would do), you cannot put in place the mod they give, and you do not see any of your visitor IP addrsses any more (you only see Cloudflare IP-s)."

      This honestly depends on the hosting provider. Some actually don't mind installing mod_cloudflare because it really doesn't add any overhead.
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  • Profile picture of the author majeemm
    I feel the primary problem is the Request a Quote form is visible to everyone on all pages.

    If the purpose of the form is to get in only reliable Quote requests then I must say, you remove the existing form from all pages and instead use TOP UP pages which pop ups only if someone click on a tab like link placed on the page. It use Javascript. An average developer will help you create one of those. Also there are many web based products offering the same. Ex: uservoice

    Rather than explaining more about this I would like you to see these websites which uses this kind of contact options
    The Only All Access Membership for Pro Marketers- Profit Marketer

    The basic idea is to make it difficult for Spammers to enter info to your form. If you use a form as mentioned above they will have to click at least 3 times to reach a page where they can enter data. Adding CAPTCHA will make the job more hard for them as Automated scripts is difficult to work on such kind of top up pages. Again the URL of the top up page is not visible for a BOT to grab.
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