Having access to a customised 404 page means I’ve been able to set up notification when someone goes to a missing page on my site and I can then correct the links. Its a practise thats worked well and I now get very few error messages coming in. However I am getting several links for various incarnations of formmail.cgi, formmail.php, and formmail.pl all in different locations such as /cgi-bin, / etc. All of them have had the referral page forged so it looks like its my site that has led them to this page (presumably because thats one of the first restrictions someone will use to lock down their mailing routine). I now have to do some more php work with those regex expressions learnt yesterday to not email me if someone requests a formmail page of whatever description. Ideally I’d want to put them in my .htaccess file programatically too so they wouldnt be able to get any more pages (or make them refer to a tarpit of some kind)
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I imagine you’re being hit by spambots, which are looking for open formmail scripts that they can use for drive-by spamming. I’ll have to set something up that reports the UA and IP of any bots which try and request the script.
Hm…you may be interested in something I’ve hacked up: Formmail Weasel is an extremely simple Perl CGI script that logs attempts to get at formmail to a database. It’s really, really basic at this point, but I’d like to be able to add tarpitting, as you suggested. (It’d be pretty simple to write a PHP version, I’m sure, but I know Perl and I’m just learning PHP.) You can download it at http://saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com/software
I am now blessing your keyboard…