Many emails via the contact form

[TransAmDan]

Always receiving many emails via the contact us page. Many of them looking like the one below. Its just rubbish. Blocking IP addresses may filter out a few, but perhaps I need to look into blacking out whole countries. Or tuning off the contact form all together, or just ignore the junk messages.

These are not people that have signed up. We block anyone signing up with a mail.ru or yandex.ru accounts plus block from a list of spam ip addresses. However the contact form dosn't go through this system as they are not signing up. In 24 hours received 19 emails. Some days are worse than others.

So how many genuine contact emails do I get in a year?, possibly around 3 in the last year. Reluctant to turn off the contact page, perhaps extra checks are possible on the contact page.

 

[TransAmDan]

Found a nice way to block entire countries. https://www.hostinger.co.uk/tutoria...sitors-from-specific-countries-using-htaccess.
The htaccess file is in the websites root. this gets passed every time a page is requested. With this an IP addresses can be added to be denied access. With the link above it can generate an IP address list for entire countries. So I have blocked a few troublesome countries so far. Lets see how it goes now...

 

[Will]

Have there ever been any active members on here from overseas? If not, could only UK based people be allowed to contact?
Not that there is a problem with foreign members joining, but if none have, there is probably nothing to lose?

 

[TransAmDan]

True, I have blocked most countries now apart from main countries in Europe, USA and Canada. Let's see how that goes. I do have another plan if this fails, as this method can increase loading times of the pages.
My other fallback plan is to purchase an add on which apparently filters out the rubbish on the contact form and not effecting load times of all the other pages.

 

[TransAmDan]

Well the blocking of countries sure helped. In 36 hours only received 2 emails. The down side it was slowing down the initial connection time to the website as IP addresses were checked against a list of 186,000 ip address ranges. It was a good test, but the performance hit ourweighed the gain of a less emails in my opinion.
There are other options that I will look into too.

 

[AmericanThunder]

Dan,

Blacklisting is always a bad idea. Can you not whitelist the countries you do want to accept emails from?