Posted by Chris Hope on 09/09/05 10:01

chlori wrote:

> Good morning
>
> Some of my customers are complaining that someone/something
> is spamming the contact forms on their sites in the last weeks.
>
> In the E-Mail field there is a random e-mail address with
> the domainname of the site. So it's difficult to use a junk
> filter on the mailserver, isn't it?
>
> In the comments field, the same e-mail address is repeated.
> Nothing else. It's not always the same address.
>
> These mails come at any day or night time, so if it's the
> same person, he doesn't sleep much...
>
> My questions:
> What's happening? Is that a person? Software? Why are they
> doing that? Doesn't seem to help anyone...
>
> What's the best way to stop getting those mails without
> making it a too big fight filling in the form?
>
> Thanks for your ideas!

I've been getting this a bit on some of the sites I manage. They appear
to be fishing for forms they can send spam through by sending a bunch
of headers which would go into the email and create a different email
addressed to a different person.

The way I've been combating this is to check none of the single line
fields (eg first name, last name etc) contain newline characters, and
none of the multi line fields (eg message) contain 'Content-Type:',
'multipart/mixed' or 'boundary='. If any of them match the above then
they get a message back saying the form contained invalid data.

--
Chris Hope | www.electrictoolbox.com | www.linuxcdmall.com

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