Re: [chiPHPug-discuss] making a spam-resistant e-card function

[Neil Y. <ny...@as...>]

I used to work for the Field Museum and our e-card sites would get 
slaughtered from what appeared to be automated spam generators - 
programs that would find the form and just start dumping email addresses 
and the spam text in.  At the time a simple captcha was always enough to 
stop it, as the whole process seemed to be automated - there never 
seemed to be any human involved as far as I could tell or perhaps our 
home-brew captcha wasn't valuable enough for them to waste their time on.

Neil


Arlo Leach wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I'm setting up an e-card sending function on a client's website, but I'm
> concerned that it will be abused by spammers looking for a free way to send
> mail. Do you have suggestions for how to prevent this?
>
> I can limit the number of outgoing recipients and sanitize the input to
> enforce that (I've seen people try to add a CC header to the recipient
> address and then add hundreds of additional recipients to the CC) but I
> imagine some spammers would still fool around with it. Maybe that's okay as
> long as they're not able to send more than one message at a time.
>
> I can also add a CAPTCHA to the form, but I don't have a sense of how much
> of this activity is automated vs. an actual person with a lot of time on his
> hands. I've seen spammers registering for forums who are apparently sitting
> there and going through the manual registration process.
>
> My client can't imagine anyone would bother with his e-card form, but I've
> seen so much garbage coming through my own sites that nothing would surprise
> me!
>
> Thanks,
> -Arlo
>
> _______________________________
>
> Arlo Leach
> 773.769.6106
> http://arlomedia.com
>
> Make friends with your computer
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