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If you are experiencing bogus data being submitted through your form to mail, it could be a result of a spammer who is ‘probing’ the form-to-email script on your website to determine whether it is vulnerable to abuse.

If your form-to-email script is publicly accessible, there is unfortunately very little that can be done to prevent these probes. The web server hosting your site can unfortunately not distinguish between the spam probes and a legitimate form submission. Once the spammer realises that your form-to-mail script is not vulnerable, they will move on and the mail you receive from these probes should cease.

The form to mail options provided by Hetzner are secure.

One way to reduce probing of your forms is a solution that has been developed by the CAPTCHATM Project. The CAPTCHATM is a program that can generate and grade tests (images of text/numbers) that most humans will read/pass and most current computer programs will fail. For example, humans can read distorted text, but current computer programs can’t.

For implementation and examples code, please refer to the following URL:
http://code.google.com/apis/recaptcha/docs/php.html

Another way of limiting these form-to-email probes, is to implement form validation in your HTML code. This can be done relatively simply with Javascript. Please see the below links for more information on using Javascript to validate forms:

http://elated.com/articles/form-validation-with-javascript/
http://www.javascript-coder.com/html-form/javascript-form-validation.phtml

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