Scam or Spam !

[Holiday Ray]

I'm sure lots of other LMHers receive, as I do, blank email booking enquiries from their own website.
The ones where none of the fields are completed except the senders email address.

So what are these spammers/scammers hoping to acheive here
Is it simply just to get you to click on their email address in the hope that you will ask why they sent you the email as a way of 'hooking you' so that they can then try and flog their products/service to you.

Or is it similar to 'linking' whereby they gain some sort of benefit by having their email splattered about all over the place !

I often wonder !!

[e-richard]

Ray,
The first thing I can assure you is that its unlikely to be a "person" sending the blank form.
Its probably just a computer program that wanders round the net, looking for forms and sending junk to you in the expectation that the form sends an email to your address that they can then harvest, add to their long list and sell on to the dreaded spammers.

[CSE]

Ray

Had a quick nosy at your website and tried the enquiry form but it through up that you have to fill in the blanks.
Form that we would assume you have an “on-submit” JavaScript that checks for the missing information. Is the email space included in this checking script? That should reduce some of your nuisance spammers.

[Holiday Ray]

Thanks for the response folks
e-rich
Yes, I figured that it would be an automatic form-fill type thingy (that's about as techie as I get) and not a 'real person' sat in front of a pc wearing his or her fingers to the bone.
It also makes perfect sense that they would be 'harvesting email addresses'. I just wasn't sure quite how/why they were doing it, so thanks for the info Rich.
casasantoestevo wrote

Had a quick nosy at your website and tried the enquiry form but it through up that you have to fill in the blanks.
Form that we would assume you have an “on-submit” JavaScript that checks for the missing information. Is the email space included in this checking script? That should reduce some of your nuisance spammers.

That sounds like a very good question Casa But you've lost me on that one. I'll have to ask my Web designer 'techie' person

Thanks for the advice, it's greatly appreciated

[la vache!]

The java script check for information didn't help me, but the addition of a captcha did (thanks Brooke!) - I rarely get spam through the enquiry form now, previously it was up to 100 enquiry form spam emails per day.

[Holiday Ray]

I really wish I knew the 'techie stuff' you're talking about, sounds like I need to know .
I'll find out from my 'web designer' chappy

[CSE]

Maybe this will help?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA
http://www.javascript-coder.com/html-fo ... tion.phtml

[Holiday Ray]

Big thanks LV, Ian and Irene, you're all gems .

I now know what a CAPTCHA is (I'd obviously come across them before, but didn't know what they were called).

Unfortunately, Java scripting is still well out of my league, I'll just have to get someone else to 'embed' the necessary for me. I'm sure, as LV found, that once incorporated, this will help reduce my spam enormously, which for many of us is a real pain.

So - Hoorah, LMHers come to the rescue yet again !

Three cheers for LMHers