Saw a rather devious comment spam yesterday.
My wife is a Marriage celebrant and is registered on several "portal" sites where potential customers can contact a celebrant via a contact form.
Anyway - my wife got an email via one of the sites yesterday which looked quite genuine - the customer was inquiring about a wedding on a particular date. When she crafted a reply back to them she immediately got a yahoo out of office response with a spam message in it. I suspect her email has also now been added to a spam list.
So it's either
- someone who as written a bot to input valid data into forms trying to trick the receiver into replying, then capturing the address and spamming them back immediately. Some of these sites would have a lot of clients - so wounldn't be hard to write something generic enough to get a lot of responses.
- a genuine request and someone has hacked the person's yahoo account and put a spam out of office reply in there
I'm hoping it's the 2nd one for her sake!
Comments
Captcha is not Enough
There is software these people use that can even figure out captcha. Our contact form gets hammered all the time. It's like you need captcha and a math problem combined to stop the auto bots. But that still leaves the humans that are about as brain dead as auto bots!
Your wife must have
Your wife must have panicked, spamming is a real threat for the business on the virtual world,but the second option is just the hope against hopen, now that know that you can't reverse the action better act upon it and see what you can do about, see if Yahoo can help you in any form.
Yep - your right... but t's
Yep - your right... but t's a bit hard when the form that it's coming from is not your site though. This one was also a little different in that the message itself was not spam, it was just trying to lure you into replying. I agree though - a simple captcha would stop it.
Based on my own experience
Based on my own experience with open web forms, it's the first option. Contact forms that aren't protected by CAPTCHAs are sitting ducks.
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