Lately I have been getting quite a bit of spam through my blog, every day I am getting at least 5 spam e-mails. Aksimet seems to be doing a very good job in combating my comment spam, but the spam coming from my contact form is at an all time high. After my recent weekend away to Brussels I had 65 spam e-mails in my inbox. Very frustrating!
I received this peach of a spam mail this morning, “Hi friends! Sorry for it, but I very need money!“. At least this spammer is being honest!
Even better was the spam mail I received after my Mentos explosion post. “Hey we just sending you this messange because in hjorace mann mannn middle school were doing a experimentn and we wanted to know ifn you can give us mlre ibformation about soda nexplosion!!!!!!!! thank u eva and danitza“.
Hmm… maybe Eva and Danitza are real school girls… They have been doing this experiment for almost 3 months now though… and their names change on a regular basis…
The most common spam mail I receive contains lines like, “You guys do a wonderful job! Keep up the good work!!!” or “I like it and the background and colors make it easy to read“.
It’s definitely time to stop this.
For the past two years I have been using PXS Mail Form, a simple, yet very effective contact form plugin. The plugin has not been updated since late 2005 though and with the numerous roll outs of wordpress updates this plugin has dated quite drastically. Especially it’s spam combating functionality (if it even has any!).
Last month I added Lorelle’s blog to my feedreader. Her site is the ultimate resource for WordPress tips, tricks, themes, and plugins. This morning I received a very insightful post, via her feed, on contact form plugins. In the post she has drawn up an extensive list of all the good contact form plugins avaliable. I think I’m going to investigate some of the plugins she recommends, and hopefully combat my spam issue.
What contact form plugin are you using on your blog, and are you affected by spam mail through it? Have you had any funny spam mail messages?
6 responses
Mark, have you checked out the hidden-field method?
I implemented it on the bSOLVe site, and cut down spam from about 50 a day to 0!
I hadn’t seen that, thanks Martin. I’ll definitely look into it. Looks simple enough 🙂
Hey Mark, check out this post: http://www.gottaquirk.com/post/181/an-alternative-to-irritating-captchas-
We’ve implemented this CAPTCHA free method quite successfully and seem to be one step ahead of the little spambots. Hope it helps.
hey mark,
I had the same problems but found a new modded version of the pxs mail plugin which incorporates an akismet check so if you’re using akismet or if you have an api key give it a try:
http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2007/02/18/wp-plugin-pxsmail-with-akismet/
Mark,
I had an excessive amount of spam when I activated that little contact form, sadly, however, I turned it off as a result – Will keep an eye on the comments in here.
Ovidiu: Thanks for that link. I’ve installed the updated pxsmail-with-aksimet plugin, so far I haven’t had any contact form spam. Its only been 2 days though!
I’ll keep everyone posted on how it performs over the next few days. It might just be my solution though!
Daedalus: Check back in a few days and I’ll let you know whether you should follow my lead 🙂