Version 17.10

Released version 17.10 today. Some minor enhancements, and changes to the docs. Read all about it on the Changelog page here .

If you are upgrading from a prior version, we suggest looking at the Changelog to see what is new. Read it from the version after your version. There’s some interesting new features that you might want to use. And a few bug fixes.

Always open to feature requests – and bug reports. Just use the Contact form to let me know. Or to tell me how FormSpammerTrap has blocked spam on your forms.

Version 17 – Released !

I released FormSpammerTrap version 17 today. Huzzah for me! And not good news – if you are a spammer.

Lots of new features in version 17. Optional file uploads are much better: it supports multiple files, shows a list of selected files, and image files get a thumbnail on the list.

With the new (and now required) PHPMailer used for mailing, emails (especially from more complex forms) are more consistently delivered. Delivery seems to be faster also.

Many other new features, and enhancements, and bug fixes. Take a look at the Changelog here for all the details.

Documentation also updates – including new instructions on how to get and install PHPMailer on your site. Note that if you don’t install PHPMailer, your form will show an error via the “Sanity Check”. So test the new forms after you update. And make sure that you’ve got your domain’s DKIM set up so your emails get delivered.

Thanks to those that have donated – it helps with hosting costs, plus allows me to purchase a new bag of cherry or lime Jelly Bellies.

Got any new feature requests? Need help? Use the contact form on the site. Or just send me a note telling me how FormSpammerTrap has blocked spammers on your site.

In the meantime, working on other projects. Plus my fiction writing. A new Thriller series – “The RV Vigilante” – now available on Amazon. Plus a couple of joke books. Check out my author website – RichardHellewell.com .

Thanks for your support of FormSpammerTrap!

Version 17 Release Imminent!

After a long delay – I’ve been working on my fiction books and other projects – FST version 17 is just about ready for release. I’m doing some final testing now, making sure all the features work like they should.

There are some exciting new features upcoming in version 17!

  • File Attachments are much improved. Your form can now have a ‘files’ button for multiple file attachments.  And file attachments work much better (it got borked in prior version).
  • Mail sending, especially with more complex forms, now uses PHPMailer for all mailing functions. Much more powerful than the standard PHP mail() function, and easier to implement in code. (The big delay in this version was getting file attachments to consistently work. PHPMailer made it much easier.)
  • Some bug fixes of things that broke in prior versions.
  • And more!

If you have new desired features, now is the time to let me know. The new feature of multiple file attachments was much requested. And caused me the most irritation until I decided that PHPMailer needed to be used.

Upgrading your forms to this new version will require that you download and install PHPMailer on the site. The docs will have the instructions you need. It’s just three files to put in a subfolder of where your form is.

FST has been very popular over the 10+ years it’s been in existence. I think that these new features will be well-received.

If you are on our mailing list, you’ll get an email when version 17 is released. I’m hoping for mid-February (maybe sooner). Takes a while to test everything, and update all the documentation. Especially with all the other projects – like my fiction writing (see my author web site) and other programming and web site projects.

Thanks to those that have supported FST with donations. They provide me incentive to keep updating this project.

CC’s and Forwarding Issues

I’ve released version 16 of FormSpammerTrap (FST) earlier this month. So I had to spend some time installing it on my 30 web sites. (I’m a firm believer in ‘eating your own dog food’ – using tools that I’ve written on my other web sites.) All the contact forms on my site use FST. I’m upgrading all sites to use the latest version.

While upgrading and testing, I found that the contact forms on some sites not working. And have spent the last two weeks trying to figure it out. There’s been changes to site MX records and other domain settings. Lots of testing the domain mail configuration on various testing sites. And lots of test pages and test contact pages.

As background to what I found – all of my sites have an ‘admin’ email address on that domain set up on the hosting place. And all of them have a forwarder for that admin email to forward the email to my personal account. That makes it easier to read contact emails from the 30 sites.

So when you fill out the contact form on an FST-enabled site, the email is sent to the domain’s ‘admin’ account. And that email then gets forwarded to my personal account. That’s great – when it works.

But it stopped working. Well, sometimes it worked, and sometimes test emails worked, and sometimes they didn’t. That’s been my last two weeks of efforts – among all my other projects. It was difficult to find a commonality in all sites that would indicate a solution.

So, after careful configurations and testings, I finally figured it out.

It turns out that some email clients (I use gmail) will not always forward a message properly. The gmail guys will get the message, but it will never appear in the inbox. Or the spam, or the promotions folder, or anywhere. It just gets thrown in the ‘bit bucket’.

And that was caused by my contact forms setting up a “CC” value of my personal gmail address. The email was being sent twice to the gmail account. And gmail was throwing it away – without any trace.

So the cause was:

  • If you set up a CC value in your FST form,
  • and the mail is sent to a user on your domain (which FST requires, or there is a whole other set of problems),
  • and you have a forwarding rule on your domain email to forward to an external (not your domain) email address
  • and your personal account is on gmail,
  • then the email will not be delivered. There will be no trace of it on your gmail account.

The fix is:

  • don’t have a forwarding rule, but include the CC value in your FST contact form to get it to your non-domain email account, or
  • have a forwarding rule to your personal gmail account, but don’t specify a CC email address in your FST form

Don’t do both. Or you will spend a couple of weeks trying to figure it out.

If you have followed those two rules, the forwarded emails will get received in your non-domain mail account. In my case, they also sometimes got into the spam folder on my gmail account, so I had to set up filter rules to not do that. And I still get the ‘looks like spam’ alert when reading the email, so I have to mark it as ‘not spam’, but at least I see the email in my personal gmail account. And I sometimes have to look in the ‘promotions’ folder (and the spam folder) to see if there is still an issue.

But removing the CC value from the FST contact form seems to have fixed most problems. (Although there were some changes I had to make to the MX and TXT records on several of the 30 domains on that hosting account – which is a bit geeky, so contact your hosting support to help with that.)

And that’s why the current version of FST is now version 16.10. It has notes configuration docs to alert you to potential problems if you specify the CC value in your contact form. You’ll get version 16.10 if request it via the FST contact form.

Check out the change log on the FST site for all of the new features in the past three versions. Lots of new stuff to help you get FST to work on your site.

 

Subscribe!

There’s a new spot over on the right side (or below, on smaller screens) to subscribe to notifications when there is a new post here. Just enter your name and email. You’ll get a verification email from admin@formspammertrap.com, with a link to verify your intent to subscribe.

Once you have subscribed, you’ll get a short email when we publish a new post on this site. New posts will contain information about new versions, or hints on how to use the various options in FST. Or whatever catches my fancy at the time. Continue reading →

Version 15.10 Released

Great news!  Even more new features and tweaks in the just-released (1 Jun 2022) Version 15 of FormSpammerTrap (FST)!

There are so many new features in this version – and builds on the massive amount of new features in version 14. So many new features that I had to create a separate changelog file. You’ll find the changelog on the FST site here and in the FST files we send on request.

Of course, all the new features in version 15 don’t break anything in your forms that use prior versions. Continue reading →

Welcome!

We thought that a blog-type place for FormSpammerTrap (FST) might be useful to you. So, here we are.

We plan on adding new posts about weekly. We hope to add hints about using FST on your site, to create more than just a basic contact form that will block spam bots. And, maybe some advance notices about new features.

More things are planned, as soon as I can find some time to add new stuff. Use the “Contact/Subscribe” page to sign up for the occasional  FST newsletter. We don’t share your contact information with anyone.

Thanks for stopping by!

Rick Hellewell

Somewhere Opposite Mutiny Bay WA