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What the internet throws at you, and where it stops
Automated noise is turned away on the way in, and most of the junk that tries to use your contact form is stopped there rather than passed on to you.
What arrives
- The knocking
- that starts the day you go live, handled where it arrives
- Routine probing
- absorbed before it becomes something you notice
- Your contact form
- shielded, so most junk is stopped rather than passed on
- The measures
- a much larger business relies on, standing from the first day
- Nothing to configure
- and nothing for you to keep an eye on
- A genuine sender
- occasionally caught by that shield, which is its cost
What arrives whether or not you invited it#
Every address on the internet is knocked on constantly, by programs working down lists and testing for old software, open doors and forms left unguarded. Almost none of it is aimed at you, and it starts the day you go live.
Most of it is recognised for what it is and turned away on the way in, before it reaches the part of the system that holds your work. It is weather rather than an event, and it is handled as weather.
The form, and the junk that tries to use it#
A public form is an open invitation, and some of what accepts it is not a person. The cost of junk enquiries is not storage, it is attention - every fake message somebody opens and dismisses is time taken from a real one, and the day you start skimming is the day a real one gets missed.
What I will not promise you here#
Filtering runs continuously and it is still not a promise that nothing gets through. Anybody who tells you a site cannot be broken into is selling you something. The honest position is that the common, automated attacks are handled as a matter of course, and a rare and determined one is a risk any business online carries.
The shield on your form has a cost too, and it is worth knowing about: occasionally it stops a real person, who then does not reach you and does not know it. That is the trade, it is a small one, and it is part of why there is more than one way to contact you on your site.