Contact form spam is an exclusive scheme that attacks the contact form of your website. You may have checked your input data thoroughly and filtered it diligently, but somehow the contact form spam finds it way in. Most of the contact forms that suffer are written in the well-accepted PHP script. Even though this spam is quite rare, many people complain to have been the victims of it. The spammers take the advantage of the PHP script by adding extra mail headers in a user’s mail. These efforts at spamming pose such a great danger for the reason that the attacker will make use of your site’s mail server to deal out a huge number of spam to gullible users.
Spammers have made a rising tendency of using contact forms as the bottom of public mailings. So you obviously need to know how to stop this from happening. The first stage is to identify how you will be becoming a victim.
The most rational way to find out if your contact forms have been affected is to keep an eye on your inbox. If the spammers have begun their labours, you may become aware of some sent messages as a consequence of your email address not being familiar.
Some of the steps that you can take to ensure that this does not happen are to make sure that you are not using Javascript, instead rely on advanced PHP scripts. You can also reduce the number of characters and create individual sessions for each user. There is a huge possibility that a spammer from an exact IP will continually give in your contact forms over a small time period. You may study your server logs and employ this to notice actions from spammers and organize the appropriate limits.
Another very popular method to stop contact form scam is putting a CAPTCHA or something similar in the particular contact form. But that might just create more problems for your user because he will have to read difficult words. Your user is not really bothered about this problem, is he? Moreover if there are many loopholes in the form itself, then CAPTCHA can do very little to stop the spamming from happening.
But then again contact for spam is very annoying. One more step that you may take is to install Akismet. This is not a very complex API that can be attached to your contact form and which gives back your real or false result based on if it thinks the message is spam or not. If Akismet sees it as spam, your sending of mails will be cancelled and a message will appear warning you about the failure. An orange border will come around this message if it has been identified as spam. This is used by WordPress who have a lot of data on whether something is or is not spam. Plugins are offered for many content organising systems and frameworks too. With Akismet installed, you no more need to worry about any contact form spamming.