How to handle spam form submissions

You're receiving spam at your contact or other Plone form, and you want to know how to stop it.  

I don't know why spammers think this sort of thing works!  There are a couple of avenues to approach this. 

One immediate question I have is: what do you want your legitimate users (people who want to contact you) to have to jump through to get to you?  If you're trying to welcome contact initiation from users and visitors, you probably want to avoid putting hurdles in front of them.  One such hurdle is a CAPTCHA which is a small/simple puzzle that, nominally, only a human could answer, and would have to take the time to answer.  Usually these take the form of an image on which one or two words appear, though distorted, and the visitor has to correctly type in those words before the form can be submitted.

If you are receiving inordinate amounts of spam submissions (e.g. dozens or hundreds a day) then it may be worth adding a CAPTCHA.  If you are receiving a handful of spam submissions, please consider whether you could simply ignore them or delete them from your inbox.