Spiders and "The form has an internal error"

[russellr]

Once you've got your form and FormMail installed and running beautifully, you'll sometimes get an email message with this alert:

The following error occurred in FormMail:
no_recipients
**********
Error=The form has an internal error - no actions or recipients were specified.

This can be caused by two things:

1. Someone tries to open your formmail.php directly in a browser - not via one of your forms.
2. A web spider or crawler for a search engine does the same thing.

In both cases, FormMail is being called without a form submission, so there's no recipients field with which it can send the form submission.

The best thing to do is ignore these emails once your forms are working OK.

Note that this is an important alert to help you get your forms working correctly. So, you only ignore this error once you've after you've completed your work on your forms.

Version 2.09 and later of FormMail, detect these "non form submission" activities and refrain from sending you the alert message.