Recently I've been getting spam sent from my own email address to my own email address, with the subject line Contact Form Submission from My Site, or Contact Form Submission from (insert Michael Kors or any other brand name here). These were robot generated, dropping into my inbox at a rate of one every couple of minutes. Annoying? Immensely.
My first instinct was to check the back end of my website using FTP to check that it hadn't been hacked. All was clear.
I use a Mac, and did check that my machine hadn't been vulnerable to any little nasties who'd slipped in under the radar.
I host my own site and my client sites on platforms which use the excellent CPanel as a means for managing website software, spam fighting, email addresses and much more.
I logged into CPanel and checked that Spam Assassin, which allows you to blacklist and whitelist email addresses, was working correctly. Obviously I wouldn't add my own email address to the blacklist, however! That would mean that I wouldn't receive emails from anyone. Even clients.
Next on the list was to add a filter to my email address through CPanel. Filters are great. You can assign filters to apply specific actions. In this case I set up a filter using the subject line as the main thing to be filtered (and specified that the subject should contain the words Contact Form Submission from in the subject line. This allows for the addition of whatever designer label Mr Robot is trying to pester me with), and an action that such emails not get delivered, but are immediately dumped from the server.
So far, so good. The spam emails have stopped and I can send emails from myself to myself without any problem.
I'm posting this for others who are receiving robot-driven spam emails from their own email address to their own email address, so you can address the problem easily yourself through CPanel. If you need assistance with using CPanel, contact us and we'll talk you through it or set up a filter for you.