increase in spam email

[bbolte]

anyone seen a sudden increase in the spam they receive? it's even getting through 2 spam filters. noticed the numbers going up over the last week.

[albert_chu]

just block them =P

[bbolte]

easier said then done...

[Johnny Gulag]

I get so much SPAM email it's sickening. Though I have not noticed any increase. :)

[AmbulanceBlues]

I've had the same hotmail account for years now and I get about 3-4 spams (that get past the sort-of-filter-thingy) per day. They seem like they are from the same companies but of course the sources are different. Any ideas about getting rid of those? Or should I just pay for a webmail account?

[KLB]

A lot of this spam is coming from website contact forms that spammers have learned how to exploit by seaking BBC lists into form submissions to get their messages out. To stop this problem, my web hosting provider asked all their customers to add the following instruction to all PHP contact forms BEFORE the data in a form submission is sent off to sendmail:


if (preg_match("/[\\000-\\037]/",$EMAIL)) { die(); }

The "$EMAIL" entry needs to be changed to the field name your contact form uses for email addresses. This same code needs to be applied to any form field that sends text to the email header (e.g. the subject).

I'd also recommend against using common field names like "email", "subject", etc. in forms.

[snowboarder]

I could never figure out what the incentive in SPAM was until a professor pointed out that it's a billion $ a year industry. Had no idea.......sometimes it makes you wonder if it pays to be honest!