Using my website to spam email

someone trying to send mail using my form.pl script

[james gulliver]

someone is trying to send emails from my website by sending request to /cgi-bin/formail.pl.

they are sending some variables and then modifying the request slightly to try and pick up the mail processing file. eg /cgi-bin/formail.cgi

The emails are trying to be sent to a list of recipients. i assume the spammer is monitoring one of these email boxes and when he gets a result he will send thousands of request to my site.

what should i do about this?

if anybody wants to see the requests i will stickymail them.

[gsx]

Edit the formmail file.

1) Change the filename to something other than the default (and all references to it)

2) You can change the parameter names if you understand a bit about Perl

3) If you can program in Perl, you can set the 'email' variable to a fixed value and ignore any requests to anything other than that. (You could use a secondary parameter with a different name for the real email address).

4) Again, if you can program in Perl, you can log the last 10 or twenty IP addresses and if they are hammering your server, exit Perl early.

5) If you only use the script to send mail to yourself, you can hard code the email address into the Perl source instead of being sent by parameter.

[piskie]

Not my specialism, but sticky the requests to me and I will have a look.

[Marcia]

Use another script, or change the name. Two previous discussions on this:

[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]

Much more secure is nms-formmail:
[nms-cgi.sourceforge.net...]

[james gulliver]

i have had alot of trouble with this and ended up using php mail function. this initially worked for a while and then the spammers started parsing the relevant variable to the mail page to activate an email. i have now included another set of variables which has solved the problem.

what i really want to know is should i still do something about this even though it doesnt affect me. should i report the email addresses that are listed and to the service provider? or what?

it just annoys me every time i look at the filed request report.