Contact form spammed

[cyber_Mike4]

Hi
last year I took down my contact form as it was abused by russian spammers. Even though I turned on google protection. Has that since been improved? I mean that it is no longer possible to send spam mail via my mail server? I think they somehow used a similar/modified contact PHP or alike from outside my website. The webserver log was full of failed php attempts but some worked...
Thank you very much and greetings

[pe7er]

What do you mean by taking down the contact form? Did you only unpublish the menu item to the contact form?
If the component is not unpublished, then you could trigger it via the URL.

Unpublish the component via System > "Extensions" Manage > search for the administrator component "Contacts" and unpublish it.

[cyber_Mike4]

yea unpublished. Since no more problems. My question is if that was fixed in the meantime?
I find it very strange that the contact form was abused to send spam...

[AMurray]

"if that was fixed...?" What fix are you hoping for?

Unfortunately, any type of web form is at risk of abuse from spammers or fake submission and it's not an issue unique to Joomla.

You might slow them down (with Recaptcha etc) or another anti-spam tool if you think Google Recaptcha is ineffective (but no such tool is 100% effective). The JED has several alternatives, https://extensions.joomla.org/tags/spam-protection/ or https://extensions.joomla.org/tags/captcha/.

One often mentioned is HashCash (Richeyweb). As the JED listing for HashCash (https://extensions.joomla.org/extension/hashcash/) is currently unpublished, here's the direct link to the developer's site for the download: https://www.richeyweb.com/joomla-extens ... ash-plugin

Other comments on the forum say it works for J4 but advise testing first. (Previous discussion viewtopic.php?t=986288 for reference).