Greetings! I realize this is a little off topic for this list but hopefully it will be considered a public warning / general courtesy message. I know that there are many on this list who offer domain & website hosting and so might appreciate a head's up.
In our area recently the abuse of form-mailers as a means for spammers to send out their messages anonymously has been absolutely rampant! Local universities and other such entities have had to shut down their form-mail until further notice while the problem is being addressed. If you haven't been hit you're lucky and should take the time to check out your security on your form-mail. We had our form-mail set to only allow domains hosted on our servers to access it but were still exploited. Once your server(s) get blackholed there is no end of work involved in getting the issue resolved. Not the least of which is dealing with all your client complaints about their emails not getting through to people they're sending mail to. Another pain is that the application that the spammers (usually porn btw) use effectively monopolizes port 80 on your webserver so nothing else can talk to it and therefore even clients without forms on their sites are affected by this security breech. In our case we've moved to an authorized recipient list format for forms which is a bit of an administrative pain in that every time there's a new mailbox that forms need to be sent to we need to update the list but this is far better than doing nothing. Other people are moving to CGIEmail which apparently does the job too. (In our case we didn't want to force our clients to rework their forms so it wasn't an option for us.) I won't go into more detail because this isn't really a domain registration issue but if there are folks on this list that are saved the many hours of grief that we went through because I took the time to type this then I'll feel a like it was time well spent. Cheers. Jack Broughton CanTech Solutions
