Using an online contact form (for example, see this contact form) is a convenient way for your website visitors to send you a message.

Unfortunately, however, like almost everything else, spammers have figured out ways to abuse it. There are many ways to significantly reduce spam from contact forms. The most common way is to use “captcha”.

A “captcha” requires a site visitor to enter a sequence of letters and numbers or solve a simple math problem that he/she sees on the screen before the email contact form is submitted. This ensures that the message is written by a person and not generated by a computer.

Despite best anti-spam efforts, however, spammers spend their time to generate creative methods to get around anti-spam tools.

In addition to using using “captcha” I have added another method to protect my primary email address from getting spam from an online contact form. Here is what I have been doing:

1. Create a random email address, such as “online-contact-form-001 @ my domain . com”
2. Set up and associate this “random” email address with the online contact form.
3. Forward messages from this random email address to my primary email address (usually done through an email service provider or your web hosting control panel).
4. If I start to notice spam due to my online contact form, the fix is simple, I just repeat steps 1-3 with a new “random” email address.

So far, this has helped me keep spam from online contact forms out of my primary email address.