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SPAM from ‘Contact Us’ form, even though form is removed

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24 Nov 2008, 9:37 AM
#1
beer_man avatar

beer_man

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SPAM from ‘Contact Us’ form, even though form is removed

Over the last few weeks I have been getting more and more spam from the form on the ‘contact us’ page.

Yesterday, I decided to remove the form, and leave the ‘contact us’ page with just the company email address.

BUT I am still receiving emails as though they are being sent form the ‘contact us’ form – its as thought the form has been cloned.

The ‘from’ IP addresses are often different, as are the SPAM messages themselves

Anything else I can do to stop this and should I be worried?

Thanks

24 Nov 2008, 1:23 PM
#3
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travellers

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Re: SPAM from ‘Contact Us’ form, even though form is removed

Beer_man:

Over the last few weeks I have been getting more and more spam from the form on the ‘contact us’ page.

Yesterday, I decided to remove the form, and leave the ‘contact us’ page with just the company email address.

BUT I am still receiving emails as though they are being sent form the ‘contact us’ form – its as thought the form has been cloned.

The ‘from’ IP addresses are often different, as are the SPAM messages themselves

Anything else I can do to stop this and should I be worried?

Thanks

The spammer (probably only one, even though he's using several IP addresses) isn't **using **your form, which is why you're still getting spam even though you've removed it. He's using his *own version *of your form, identical to the one he's used to spam hundreds of other sites with the same form, and what you're getting is the submitted *output *from the form. Once you've got your head round that distinction, dealing with it becomes easy - because a **genuine **visitor can't access the form, as it isn't physically there for him to fill in, any form responses you get **must **be spam. So, set your mail server to automatically dump any form responses you get. Then, track down your spammer and cut off both his hands, because he's probably the same :censored: who's been spamming me!

25 Nov 2008, 12:38 PM
#4
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beer_man

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Re: SPAM from ‘Contact Us’ form, even though form is removed

Thanks Both

Im going to loose the email address used in the contact us form

Thanks

3 Dec 2008, 1:36 AM
#5
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Re: SPAM from ‘Contact Us’ form, even though form is removed

Beer_man:

BUT I am still receiving emails as though they are being sent form the ‘contact us’ form – its as thought the form has been cloned.

travellers is right that you're not really getting spam through your Web site form, you're just seeing the output from the form. I often refer to this as "direct posting." At some point a spam bot indexed your form page and just kept the link that's part of the action="" attribute in the <form> element. As long as the form-to-email script in that page still exists, future bots can just blow by your form and go straight to the page that does all the work, and spam you that much faster. (Isn't that nice?)

Since you've already dumped the form itself (and if you want to keep that email address instead of losing it), another way to handle this would be to also delete the script or page that actually processes your old Contact Us form. For most contact forms, the form-to-email scripting can usually be found in the thank you page for the form. Unfortunately I'm still pretty new to Zen Cart so I don't know where to direct you specifically.

Maybe someone else can help with where to locate and delete the script or page that processes Contact us forms?

3 Dec 2008, 1:40 AM
#6
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Re: SPAM from ‘Contact Us’ form, even though form is removed

just go to includes/modules/pages/ delete or rename the folder contact_us, this page will be no longer accessible.