Lorem ipsum email messages

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  buieboat · Member · Jun 22, 2015 at 4:44 pm

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  Hi. I’m running the ‘Stay’ theme on my site advertising our self-catering house and using the ‘contact form’ to gather enquiries. The site’s been active for only a few weeks but I’ve had a number of enquiries via the contact form where the text in the ‘comment’ box (i.e. where the enquirer puts in their question/enquiry/comment) is lorem ipsum text rather than English (or another proper language). The ‘enquiries’ are from different email addresses. Can anyone tell me what’s going on? Thanks.
  (PS I’m in Scotland where we use British English, so I’m saying ‘enquiry’, not American English ‘inquiry’!)

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  buieboat · Member · Jun 23, 2015 at 5:02 pm

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  I’ve not had any replies to this question yet and I’m wondering if maybe some folk aren’t familiar with what “Lorem Ipsum” is – it’s the meaningless Latin style text that designers use to fill text boxes when creating the layout for a visual design for a page containing text and images. Here’s an example of one of the emails I’ve received: “Wzxgfy lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.”
  I’m concerned it may be something sinister, perhaps a phishing attempt, so I’ve not responded to them….but I’m also concerned they may be genuine enquiries that have fallen foul of a (known WordPress?) bug in which case I’m ignoring potentially valuable customers!
  Any help anyone can give would be much appreciated!

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  justjennifer · Member · Jun 23, 2015 at 5:59 pm

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  Someone has tagged with the MODLOOK tag for Staff assistance. Please be patient until they reply.

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  brookedot · Member · Jun 23, 2015 at 10:48 pm

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  Hi Lesley,

  I have taken a look at a few of these enquiries . To me they look like spam, I’m afraid. We do run our spam filter, Akismet, on the contact form but sometimes we miss some spam. In these cases you can help the algorithm get smarter by clicking the “Spam” link that appears when hovering the comment.

  One way to tell if this is spam is by looking at the email address used, for example one of the comments used the email address mailinator.com which is a throw away email service. Another used the domain “veryrealemail.com” in their domain which is not a actual domain.

  If you need anything else let us know.

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  buieboat · Member · Jun 24, 2015 at 9:20 am

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  Thanks, bdukes, that’s put my mind at rest!