What do these want ?!

[Fil]

I've only had my site running for one month and are getting a few of these messages

nome:
email: ...................
phonenumber: cuwtHuYEJGgkrCJw
guests: oupWVyIOwTpIIQ
dates: lEMtFOXFLLg
coments:

What do they want with them ?

[Margaret]

We get those all the time. Just delete them, they are a weird sort of spam!

[Paul Carmel]

I think she/he may have buggered up the cut and paste.................Bin it it Fil, Sloppy work

[Fil]

But why does anyone take the time to type a few senseless letters in an enquire form ? A scammer would certainly write a real text and fake identity and phone number to try to get an answer. But this ? Are they just trying to get the email address. But why in this case would they bother to type so many letters and numbers ? I am really puzzled.

[Margaret]

I think it is spam not scam. The main difference seems to be that a scam is trying to get something from you. Spam is totally without purpose other than to clog up your inbox. Why do people send out viruses? Because they can. Same for spam I reckon!

[e-richard]

..But why in this case would they bother to type so many letters and numbers ? I am really puzzled.

Fil, it was probably not even done by a human. They have a computer program that runs around the internet, looking for any sort of form to fill in with random stuff and on submitting the form they are trying to harvest email addresses - for later spamming.

[la vache!]

I used to get loads of these, Fil, until I put a captcha on my enquiry form (thanks Brooke!). I never understood why either. The odd one slips through now, but on the whole I'm spam free now.

[CSE]

Could it be that they are testing out things to see if your email is live?

[Cassis]

Perhaps if you build in to your form a radio button that is a required field, that will stop it? Just a thought, as we have a button that indicates that enquirers have read and agreed to terms and conditions and the form can't be processed unless it's checked. It may be coincidence but we've never had funny emails like that from our enquiry forms. We use bnbform.cgi from Bignosebird. It's a Perl form.