People are getting my email address for spam

[drennan]

Hey all,

Recently, I've been getting a lot of spam to the inbox associated with the contact form on my site. The form requires validation so I guess people are checking my code to get the name of the php form processing script, then loading that document to find my email address. When they view the script, I get an email with blank fields, which is happening a lot lately, hence the large amount of spam that follows. Is there a way to stop this, for example, hiding the php script somehow? I don't want this to start happening on my customer websites as it's really annoying. thanks guys

[nathanwall]

They shouldn't be able to actually see the contents of the PHP script, unless your server is configured very poorly.

I suspect something else is going on here.

[drennan]

Yes you're right, the contents of the script don't display. Any idea how they could be getting my email address then? I seem to get spam soon after a blank email is received. thanks

[rtrethewey]

Is your Email address embedded in the HTML on the page where the contact form resides? That's a common way for SPAMmers to obtain Email addresses.

[drennan]

Ah, yes it is. not in the body text but a button has a mailto attached to it, forgot about that. What threw me was the blank emails so I thought someone was loading the php script to get my email address. thanks.