Posted by Vince Morgan on 12/17/06 02:30

"Thanks" <Thanks@work.com> wrote in message
news:45848ea5$1_2@news.tm.net.my...
> We have an Apache server with webpage written in php.
> Few months ago we discover that tons of spams is being relay through our
> webserver.
> so we remove the email server link from php.ini
> that stop the spams but also the 'contact us' form and 'email this page
> form' function
> stop working.
> Note: the 'contact us' form and 'email this page form' is using the simple
> mail() function to send mail.
>
> Now we have to enable the 'contact us' form and 'email this page form'
> function again.
> So we downloaded the phpmailer from
> http://phpmailer.sourceforge.net/
> and install it into our webserver.
> This mailer utility allows authentication when communicating with the
email
> server.
> My question is will this be able to prevent spams?
>
> Thanks for advice.
>
>
>

How are they using 'contact us' for relay? I would think that the first
argument "to" should be a fixed value. Without being able to change that
they could only spam that one address.
However, the 'email this page' is another story.
You could check that the body, or subject, depending on how you set it up,
is a URL first. Then that the URL matches only those from your site.
Of course they could circumvent that but without knowing why the emails
aren't sending in the first place, it would be very difficult for them.
Hopefully difficult enough to make it altogether very unattractive.
Of course you wouldn't send back a page describing the reason for the error
:)
You could look at using a "captcha" image as well.
I'll be interested in reading other's solutions too.

HTH
Vince Morgan

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