I created a woocommerce site for a family member and unbeknownst to me they were getting spammed on their email. They ended up creating a new email via Gmail business (or whatever Google calls it) to stop the spam, but today they got a rush of emails that were obviously spam (I’m talking different languages type stuff). When I looked at the WSForm, I saw that I didn’t have a reCaptcha on it so I added a version 3 reCaptcha. What I am confused on is how exactly did this spam occur? I looked at the submissions that WSForm records and none of those same emails he showed me were there. Also, the email itself is I’m plaintext on the website, but that shouldn’t be an issue as lots of sites have their emails advertised and don’t have problems with bots webscraping. Additionally, doesn’t Gmail have automatic and very good spam detection to prevent this by default? He does use Outlook as his UI versus Gmail, but even then the amount of spam is very odd to me.
Can someone please explain if this is my fault and if the reCaptcha was the actual problem?
[deleted]
It’s common to get spam if you have your email public. Sounds like they are directly sending you email rather than through your contact form. For that kind of spam, Google’s spam filter usually enough. Unfortunately, you cannot do much about how Gmail’s spam filter works. Just make sure to flag them as spam.
Spammers prefers to submit you spam via a contact form because they know it’s likely to end up in your inbox as it will come from your website email.
Having a spam filter is important for contact forms. Since you added reCaptcha that should help. If you still get spam, install more advanced spam filtering plugin like OOPSPam. It supports WooCommerce and WSForm.
It’s hard to say for sure. But, when this happens, I advise discarding the plugin based form completely and instead use an embedded form such as Wufoo forms. Embedded forms have improved deliverability, too.