At this time I only have Contact Us form (using WPForms Lite plugin) with Google reCAPTCHA v2 (Invisible reCAPTCHA badge) and I still get spam a few times a week. The site is public but has not been advertised anywhere and doesn’t have any content except for a few pages. There are no links to that site anywhere.
Even though I want to make it easy for people to reach me I am reluctant to publish email address on the Contact Us page for 2 reasons:
1. Page scrapers will pick it up and I will start receiving enormous amount of spam (I actually had to abandon one of my email accounts for that reason. I didn’t really publish it anywhere but used it for most of my online shopping and it was probably leaked or sold).
2. Email address will allow malicious actors to send virus-infected attachments. I do use one of the established email providers but virus scanners are often a few steps behind virus authors. I do know not to open any attachments from people I don’t know or expect an email from but why even take a chance?
What do you think? If you published your email on your Contact Us page – do you suffer from the issues I mentioned?
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You’ll get much more spam by publishing your email address than using a contact form with a captcha.
I’m using cleantalk.org since 2016 or 2017 don’t remember clearly, since then its drastically eliminate spam of my contact form and prevent bots to signup (if you allow visitor to create an account). Its quite cheap for 1-5 websites, I even bought 10 licenses to be used on my clients’ websites.
Public email addresses are get listed in spammers database then both your contact form and email get lots of spam.
They have bots that go through websites. If your website indexed by a search engine (e.g Google), bots will find your email too.
We’re using OOPSpam for spam protection. If a submission is spam, then a message appears and give the visitor an email address to directly reach out. Bots don’t see this email because they just submit and move on but legitimate visitor contact us via the email.