Contact form spam block problem

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Viewing 3 posts - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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  • 11/02/2015 at 4:50 pm #353133
    David Thompson
    Participant

    When I test the contact form on my directory profile in single view, I see a momentary error that says “SMTP connect() failed. https://github.com/PHPMailer?PHPMailer/wiki/Troubleshooting”.

    My website url is http://fallbrookwellnessdirectory.com

    I am using a Mandrill account smtp settings via WP Mail SMTP plugin because my host (GoDaddy) email server does not send.

    Could you try to send me a contact email at this page: http://www.fallbrookwellnessdirectory.com/providers/name/joe-mama/

    Please see if you have an idea what is wrong and let me know what I should do.

    Thank you very much

    David Thompson

    11/02/2015 at 6:16 pm #353135
    David Thompson
    Participant

    Here’s the other error message I get the first time I try a listing’s contact form:

    “You filled out a form field that was created to stop spammers. Please go back and try again or contact the site administrator if you feel this was an error.”

    What the heck is going on??

    11/03/2015 at 10:19 am #353205
    Steven Zahm
    Keymaster

    @ David

    re: “You filled out a form field that was created to stop spammers. Please go back and try again or contact the site administrator if you feel this was an error.”

    This one is easy to answer… my best guess is that you have a browser plugin / extension automatically filling in a couple hidden form fields. Let me explain…

    You see the “Name” field, what you do not see is two fields, one for first name and the other for last name. These are hidden and set not to autofill by the browser. Spam bots will fill in these automatically and when Connections receives a submission with these fields filled in, it rejects it as spam. This is a very common anti spam method, one of several Contact uses to prevent spam. This is called spam honeypot fields.

    So a browser extension/plugin must be filling these in because the browser will not due to the no autofill setting.

    I do not receive this message when testing… I suspect if you test in a private browsing window you will not receive it either.

    If I may, I suggest you figure out which browser extension/plugin is leaking this info because it is being submitted when it should not be. I would suggest not using it because there is no telling what other info it is leaking.

    re: When I test the contact form on my directory profile in single view, I see a momentary error that says “SMTP connect() failed.

    This is far more difficult to answer as this is not an error being generated by Contact or Connections. Contact uses a standard WordPress function wp_mail() to send email.

    The WP Mail SMTP plugin configures the settings for sending an email at the end of the wp_mail(). Contact does not change or change this. All it is doing is reporting the error that was reported by wp_mail(). It is this error that your are seeing. More can be read about it here:

    https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/wiki/Troubleshooting#smtp-error-could-not-connect-to-smtp-host

    Reading that page seems to indicate that the settings for sending the email is not correct. So, I guess my question is, does the Test Email work in the WP Mail SMTP plugin?

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