Difference between guestbook and form mail?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Viken Karaguesian
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Viken Karaguesian

Hello everyone,

I've been thinking about this a bit: What, exactly, is the difference
between the guest book form and any other form mail? More specifically, why
do I get spam in my guestbook but not my other form based e-mails?

Thinking out loud here - I have a guest book and a contact page in the same
website. The guest book is obvious, the contact page has a form that people
can fill out to e-mail me (so I don't have to give out my e-mail address).
Both the guest book and the contact page have the same type of form and
they're both e-mailed to the same e-mail address. Yet, my guest book gets
some spam, but I NEVER get spam to my other form on the contact page.

So, this leads me to believe that its the file name of the guest book page
that's being targeted by the spammers (guestbook.htm) and not necessarily
the form itsself. As it stands now, I get enough spam to the guestbook that
I no longer allow immediate updating of the guest book entries. All entries
are e-mailed to me and I post them manually. So, if I were to remove my
guest book page and replaced it with an e-mail form disguised as a guestbook
form that would, in theory, solve my problems with spam in the guest book.
Of course, I would have to change the name of the page to something other
than "guestbook.htm" (or variation of guestbook.htm). What would the
difference be if I'm already manually filtering every entry? Guestbook spam
outnumbers legitimate guestbook comments by about 50 to 1.

I'm curious as to how the spam bots differentiate the difference between a
guestbook form and an e-mail form? I'll be interested in hearing your
replies and thoughts.
 
You get spam in your guestbook because the spammers are hoping that others
will see it and people will click on it and / or search engines will get
the
link(s).
Click to expand...

I understand that. My point is: Even though the the guest book and the
contacts page are based on the same form, the guest book gets messages and
the e-mail form does not. So, the bots can somehow tell the difference
between the e-mail form and the guestbook form. How? My only guess is the
file name.

Go here: http://www.sayatnova.com

Go to Information-->Mailing List. This is a form that e-mails the results
to an e-mail address. This has NEVER gotten spam in years! Then, you can go
to the guest book and see the same form. This gets spam on a daily basis,
even though I've renamed it many times. In fact, the bots still try and spam
the old file names! But, even though I"ve renamed it, the words "guest" and
"book" have always been part of the file name. Maybe I'll try and name it
something like "abcdefg.htm" and see if I still get spam.

I'm curious if there's anything different about the guestbook form that
somehow makes it more of a target than other forms.
 
The bots look for the terms guest / guestbook etc. Just like the bots that
post on boards - they look for ads, classifieds, etc. And sometimes they are
not bots - they are people.

My contact form never gets spam but it only goes to me. My blog gets
spammed all the time but i is set up so not to display them. They are only
trying to gain maximum exposure. Completing your contact form will only be
sent to you - your guestbook will be seen by hundreds
 
Your guestbook will be seen by hundreds, you contact form will be seen by
you. And the spammers know that. They look for guest / guestbook. Just
like on message boards, they look for ads / classified ads to post their spam.
 
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