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<DIV>Hi folk<BR><BR>I don't know if I introduced myself, I am not sure. I am a
Linux user for a handful of years, and only recently started using PHP to put
simple code on our church website. I am not an expert programmer though I hope
to be one day when all my other commitments allow me!!!<BR><BR>My question: I
have a simple phpmail script as part of a feedback form. I keep getting
spam email to my webmaster email address. I have removed all links on the
website to this email address, so the only source I could think of is from the
phpmail script. Any suggestions on how I can stop unsolicited emails? The spam
emails don't use the form.<BR><BR>Thanks for any help.<BR><BR>Mo<SPAN
class=781305216-05092006><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff
size=2> </FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=781305216-05092006></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=781305216-05092006></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=781305216-05092006><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff>Hello
Mo,</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=781305216-05092006><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff>There's
a number of things that could be happening that could cause this for
you.</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=781305216-05092006><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff>If you have
a "catchall" email address set up on the site then any email address sent to
the site will be accepted by the server.</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=781305216-05092006><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff>Also there
are a number of "always valid" email addresses that the server will have set
up </FONT> <FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff>such as postmaster@ admin@ etc,
spammers know these will be there and will often use them hoping they will be
read.</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=781305216-05092006><FONT face=Arial
color=#0000ff></FONT></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=781305216-05092006><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff>The options
are either to live with it, use spam filtering on the server and risk losing
some valid emails - in that often major ISPs such as Telewest and BT get
blacklisted by these sites or if you have some access to the server use the
hosts.deny file to block IP ranges where you never expect to get valid email
from.</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=781305216-05092006><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff>As and
example of this I've blocked pretty much anywhere thats not European, North
American or Australasian on my servers - and customers have been told that.
Spam still gets through, but nowhere near as much.</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=781305216-05092006><FONT face=Arial
color=#0000ff></FONT></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=781305216-05092006><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff>If you want
to have an email address on a page and render it invisible then embed it into
a graphic and use that to trigger a form submit to stop it being culled by
spam harvester robots.</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=781305216-05092006><FONT face=Arial
color=#0000ff></FONT></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=781305216-05092006><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff>Be careful
using "simple" PHP feedback scripts, if they are the usual sort of crap off
somewhere like hotscripts.com then there are also harvester robots looking for
instances of the file on websites whihc they will then exploit for sending
more spam. </FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=781305216-05092006><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff>I saw that
on one of my customers sites a few days ago, first thing I knew about it was
when I started getting a load of admin level bounces coming through, and I had
to waste hours tracking it down.</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=781305216-05092006><FONT face=Arial
color=#0000ff></FONT></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=781305216-05092006><FONT face=Arial
color=#0000ff>Phil</FONT></SPAN></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE></BODY></HTML>