Incoming spam management

[Mark]

What are people using to control spam?

There's two problems

1/ The incoming spam itself

2/ The mail that is sent to spammers confirming their message has been processed.

In the second case, sending the spammers an email confirmation, usually to fake emails, causes hard bounces and therefore degrades credibility with 3rd party mail providers (I use sendinblue). This loss of credibility means real users mail arrives more slowly.

[AndyC]

I'm using the No Captcha reCAPTCHA Module by thirty bees module. Since I started using it my spam is almost Zero

[datakick]

7 hours ago, Mark said:

2/ The mail that is sent to spammers confirming their message has been processed.

This is not usually what happens. Spammers use email addresses of real people, not their own. They are abusing your server to act as a sender of spam mails. Of course, they occasionally use their own email address to check that the emails are sent, but in most cases they use real email addresses.

 The most efficient way to mitigate this is to block outgoing contact_form emails. Spammers will have no reason to abuse your website, if it does not send emails to end users

[Mark]

56 minutes ago, datakick said:

This is not usually what happens. Spammers use email addresses of real people, not their own. They are abusing your server to act as a sender of spam mails. Of course, they occasionally use their own email address to check that the emails are sent, but in most cases they use real email addresses.

 The most efficient way to mitigate this is to block outgoing contact_form emails. Spammers will have no reason to abuse your website, if it does not send emails to end users

You are bound to be right @datakick, but in my sendinblue account, a number of spam accounts have hard bounced... I dont know why...I just know Ive been ratelimited as a result... Is there a UI way to block contact_form emails? or will I need to make code adjustments...?

By the way thanks @AndyC I did have that running before my old site was hacked, I hadnt resurrected it on the rebuilt site so thanks for the reminder.

Edited September 13, 2021 by Mark

[datakick]

14 minutes ago, Mark said:

You are bound to be right @datakick, but in my sendinblue account, a number of spam accounts have hard bounced... I dont know why...I just know Ive been ratelimited as a result... Is there a UI way to block contact_form emails? or will I need to make code adjustments...?

You can download my Consequences module and use it to block the outgoing email. I'm using it myself.

 

[Mark]

49 minutes ago, datakick said:

You can download my Consequences module and use it to block the outgoing email. I'm using it myself.

 

Brilliant thanks had totally forgotten about this module since the rebuild also. Thanks @datakick