Spam Possible from Contact Form Plugin?????????

  • Hi

    I’m wondering if anyone might know the chances of a spam bot (or whatever people use nowadays to farm email addresses) getting my email address from having installed and using this Contact Form plugin?

    https://ryanduff.net/projects/wp-contactform/

    I’ve written twice to the author of the plugin, but he’s never gotten back to me.

    It would seem safe to use, but I’m just wondering.

    Thanks

    ZP

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • Getting your address ? About nil I’d say ??

    Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    No, there is no possibility of a spam bot getting your email address from a contact form. But, if you are running a version of WP-ContactForm below the current release (v1.3), then it is possible for a spam bot to send email spam to you via the contact form.

    Zenpop: Sorry, I get alot of mail. There is no way to farm an email address from the form. The form just sends the data back to a script and is no way printed in the source of the page for a bot to harvest.

    There may not be a way to farm an email address from the form, ryanduff, but there is a way robots are submitting to it. If you wish, I will forward the group of three I just received to your email address, and maybe you’ll be able to see what they’re doing and how. Just let me know at bj at kickasswebdesign dot com.

    Kinda bums me out since I installed this to foil this very thing, and your site says, “Improved Spam Handlinga€“ now rejects bot generated spam messages”

    There’s really nothing to stop a robot from parsing the form and sending a post request to the appropriate location. Chances are, these submissions are bots that are designed to look for comment forms, and happen to mistake your contact form for something that they can use to spam your website. I’d recommend Referer Karma and Spam Karma 2:
    https://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/
    https://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/ref-karma/

    However, the newer version of the script (1.3) does prevent email injection attacks, which could have been used (in the 1.2 version) to send spam emails to countless recipients using your server’s resources, and leaving you to blame.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • The topic ‘Spam Possible from Contact Form Plugin?????????’ is closed to new replies.