How can I protect my website contact forms from abuse using a CAPTCHA?

Our service is often used in combination with web contacts forms - we regularly see these forms being targeted by automated bots to send spam to the webmaster or if the form permits, a named recipient. This can easily be prevented using a CAPTCHA function.

A CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test) is a function that uses a series of images or questions that the user has to respond to in order to verify that they are a human before the form can be submitted.

We would recommend that you use the free CAPTCHA service provided by Google called reCAPTCHA.

Google provide extensive developer documentation with many code examples including a PHP library, this can be used in conjunction with PHPMailer which is a library that can be used send email via our service from a PHP based website.

You can find the necessary resources to add a CAPTCHA to your form here: