What's the best way to set up a Contact form???

[chrisnrach17]

We have a contact form in place at the minute but messages sent to us using the form are being spammed by our office spam system (GFI - Bayesian analysis).

The form itself is a PHP script and up until recently has been working really well. I've taken up the Bayesian spam issue with GFI but so far they have been unable to help.


Is a PHP script the best way of going about Contact forms? Is there an alternative way with a decent tutorial on setting it up using Dreamweaver? I presume the form we have is ok in itself - just that we need an alternative way of handling the form?


thanks in advance.

[ScriptMan]

All the contact forms I have seen or used to date are susceptible to the dedicated spammer.

Restricting file size and type while making sure your script excludes the possibility of remote use is about all that I know you can do.

An image or question to verify human live user and a Meta redirect after posting to ensure that the same form can not be used again without new verification is the only other step that seems to help.

[drudarby]

maybe you can submit the results to a database instead of sending it in a mail message. THen just check the page with database results periodically.

just an idea...?

[leonid]

You can obfuscate a bit the form submission process using Javascript.
If you make it a 2 step process where
1st click will make the form visible and also will inject the submit button into the DOM tree.
2nd click on that dynamic submit will send the form.

[nsciberras-GFI]

Hi,

You may want to whitelist the sender of the emails coming from your PHP script. Most probably the emails are blocked because of the content of the email message, not because of the scripting technology that you use.

Therefore feel free to use your preferred scripting language

[ScriptMan]

Originally Posted by nsciberras-GFI

Hi,

You may want to whitelist the sender of the emails coming from your PHP script. Most probably the emails are blocked because of the content of the email message, not because of the scripting technology that you use.

Sorry for being blunt! Did you read what the OP posted?

[nsciberras-GFI]

Originally Posted by ScriptMan

Sorry for being blunt! Did you read what the OP posted?

Of course I did. I'm not getting your point though.

[ScriptMan]

Originally Posted by nsciberras-GFI

Of course I did. I'm not getting your point though.

I owe you an apology.

Sadly it I who mis-read the post. I thought his contact form was getting spam submissions. What he really said is that the in house spam blocker is trapping the mail.

We have a contact form in place at the minute but messages sent to us using the form are being spammed by our office spam system (GFI - Bayesian analysis).

Therefore white listing the domain name is the proper course. A second choice might be not to use the posters email address as the sender if the script is in fact doing that.

[seosean]

Make sure the php portion of the form that's sending the email is using a from email address - this usually always gets caught in a spam filter if you don't have a from address or your server setup using some sort of default email address like root@domain.com