Have you had a contact form posting with something like this...
We noticed that you are not at the top of the search engines for a number of your key terms. We have helped companies similar to yours to achieve top organic rankings. Please reply to this message and we will prepare a special proposal for you, to show you how we can achieve similar results for you.
- You look at the Name and it says a blokes name like Randall.
- You look at the email address and it says a girls name like Rachelle at Gmail.com.
- You look at the phone number and it says something like 01234 567890.
- Then you look at the senders ip address - ah, New Delhi, now there's a surprise!
I say at this point that I have Indian friends and have no ethnic animosities in the direction of the India Sub-Continent. However, virtually all of this sort of spam I get from there with the other bit coming from the Balkans.
It puzzles me why people fill in contact forms posting such rubbish messages. If they put a half consistent message together instead of posing as some sort of cross-dresser it would be a good start. If they put a credible phone number in, it would help.
The icing on the cake however is that they make wild assumptions about what markets I am aiming my SEO at. If they knew my business and knew what my SEO targets were they would then know that I am hitting my targets. So if, dear reader, you are one of these spammers please do more homework. If you are one of those afflicted with these inane emails and have had enough of them, here's what I do...
- Check the IP address of the sender - if your contact form isn't picking this up for you then this is a must! The IP address can be used to determine the rough geographic location of your visitor. There are lots of geographic look ups available on the web.
- I use references such as Country IP Blocks to check the country that IP range is assigned to because my plan is to block that range in future.
- Alter my mailing code to reject that IP octet. If we're picking up the IP address with code like this...
$ipaddr = isset($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']) ? $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] : '';
Then we just need to reject comments from IP octets who have been filling our mailbox with spam using code like this...
$my-ip-blacklist = '115 122 182 '; // this is just a list that I want to reject - 182 would reject 182.0.0.0 - 182.255.255.255 note that 2 digit octets will need a decimal point after them eg. 82.
if (strpos($my-ip-blacklist, substr($ipaddr,0,3)) !== false) { $error = "Bye bye spammer!"; }
I have made the assumption that after this there is some general error display which is checking for contents in $error
The downside is that I'm missing out on a potentially sensible request or work request from someone in this IP address range but as my business is geographically based, I'm happy to risk that and as new international spam comes in I will happily add more to my blacklists.
