Contact form abuse?

I may be developing a simple site soon, which will include a contact
page. On that page I will naturally give the company contact info, but
for email I might use a form for email requests in addition to, or in
place of, simply giving an email address.

I've heard of online forums, guest books, etc, being bombarded with spam,
but I'm wondering if the same thing commonly happens to companies that
only provide a form for emailing queries. Does anybody have any war
stories to tell?

--
- Steve
"I think a good friend would recommend CLR to all his friends."

Steve Greenaway wrote:
> I may be developing a simple site soon, which will include a contact
> page. On that page I will naturally give the company contact info,
> but for email I might use a form for email requests in addition to,
> or in place of, simply giving an email address.
>
> I've heard of online forums, guest books, etc, being bombarded with
> spam, but I'm wondering if the same thing commonly happens to
> companies that only provide a form for emailing queries. Does
> anybody have any war stories to tell?

I use one on one of my sites and catch the persons IP and other info. I had
someone spam me via the form and I reported it but the ISP refused to do
anything since the "email" didnt come from their email servers. Go with an
email address so you can LART spammers or be ready to block IPs from that
page.

"Steve Greenaway" <macfisto@engsoc.org> wrote in message
news:cs9bsb$rvv$1@driftwood.ccs.carleton.ca...
> I may be developing a simple site soon, which will include a contact
> page. On that page I will naturally give the company contact info, but
> for email I might use a form for email requests in addition to, or in
> place of, simply giving an email address.
>
> I've heard of online forums, guest books, etc, being bombarded with spam,
> but I'm wondering if the same thing commonly happens to companies that
> only provide a form for emailing queries. Does anybody have any war
> stories to tell?

I include my email address in the company contact information, but instead
of making it a "mailto:" link its a link to the "Contact Us" page

This way people who want to send us something by email can cut and paste or
key in the email address, but for the most part people just use the contact
us form which lets us flag the email as coming from the website (plus what
page and/or what restaurant its coming from) and set preset subject lines so
we can direct their email to where/who it belongs

As far as spam goes... people post spam/links to forums and guest books so
they can advertise their service to your users and/or get a link from your
site... thats not something you have to worry about with including your
email address, but if you get pretty much anywhere in the search engines or
directories you'll end up getting your email address grabbed by a bot and
you'll start getting spam in your inbox

That would be the main argument for including only a comment form and not
your email address on your site... but eventually some spammer will track
down your email address (especially if you use common names like "info",
etc... they can just guess at it and send an email to info@_________.com and
hope it goes through)

Steve Greenaway wrote:


> I may be developing a simple site soon, which will include a contact
> page. On that page I will naturally give the company contact info, but
> for email I might use a form for email requests in addition to, or in
> place of, simply giving an email address.

> I've heard of online forums, guest books, etc, being bombarded with
> spam,
> but I'm wondering if the same thing commonly happens to companies that
> only provide a form for emailing queries. Does anybody have any war
> stories to tell?

As soon as your contact page will get indexed by a major search engines,
you'll get a visit or two a day from individuals trying to exploit
anything that is exploitable on the form. Just exercise reasonable
precaution installing the form. You DON'T want it to be able to send
e-mails anywhere else but yourself, and it has to be hard-coded into the
script that you'll be running. Make sure you carefully read installation
instructions or have a pro do the install for you. Most form-to-e-mail
scripts have been armed with measures against spam these days, and you
always want to get the latest version of such script.

BTW, it will help you reduce number of unwanted visits to your contact
page if you include "noindex" meta tag in it.


Sincerely,
Dmitri
http://www.1-script.com/1_search/
Get search engine for your site
http://www.1-script.com/install/
Check out my CGI scripts installation offer
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>I may be developing a simple site soon, which will include a contact
> page.

I wrote one that keeps up with all visitors and there are always a few
visitors trying to 'dig' out my email address - but it's 'hard coded' in the
output file.

http://www.ibdhost.com/contact/

Has tutorial / code that is easy to read so you can build your own.