Erik

@beachmat, apologies for the delayed response.

To identify the issue as quickly as possible, I need to ask a few questions:

• Are you using the correct two-letter lowercase country code (e.g., “it” for Italy)?
• Could you please check your WordPress upload folder for the geoip file? You can find it at /wp-content/uploads/cf7-antispam/GeoLite2-Country.mmdb.
  If the file is missing, and you have the WooCommerce plugin installed with geolocation enabled, this is normal. In that case, CF7 Antispam should be using WooCommerce’s database. Let me know if that’s the case, as there might be another issue at play.

Thank you already for your cooperation, these kinds of feedback are very useful!

Closing as duplicate

Hi @paupiviri, thanks for the report! it looks like something with the activation of the plugin and probably with the creation of the tables, but without debugging, I can hardly help you. Can I ask you a favour? Could you activate the debug and publish the result?

You can find how to do it here. What I’m interested in is what you find in /wp-content/debug.log after you activate define( ‘WP_DEBUG_LOG’, true );

Please delete your personal data (if any)

Sorry, I just didn’t see this ticket you had opened. ??

There could be many reasons for this, for example, there could be too few mails you have received (until you have received few mails, B8 is not activated).

Additionally, B8 detection adds to the spam score the “Bot detected” value (the default value is 0.7), and to be blocked, that score has to reach a threshold of at least 1

ok gotcha! using the flamingo user interface and marking as spam an email didn’t store the ip in the blacklist. Will fix that, let me know if this is what you need.

PS. the email would only be saved for reference in the blacklist, but for antispam purposes it is not very useful as any fake email address can easily be entered as it cannot be verified (apart from a simple pattern check)

Ok nice idea! I will implement it in the plugin asap.

to be clear, you need to add the recipient of the email to the blacklist table whenever you click on the ‘spam’ button on the ‘flamingo_inbound’ page. is this what is needed?

eh… unfortunately I know, I will try to fix it very soon (a couple of days) and release a new version. thanks for the report!

Hello, sorry for the missing information… To be more specific the scores you are asking about:

• ‘Bad string’ all checks where a string must match the one in the mail whether this is a string in the mail (Bad Email Strings) or a blacklisted user agent (Bad User Agent) etc. generally speaking all the fields starting for “Bad”
• ‘Bot warn’ some automatic checks assign this score, for example the missing IP address or language check failed
  

Spam words lists (sorry for the missing link was lost in some way ??)

https://www.pipedrive.com/en/blog/email-spam-words
https://lix-it.com/blog/spam-trigger-words/

I was checking in the plugin codebase for this error but it is neither part of the AntiSpam plugin nor Contact Form 7… Where do you find it? on what specific event it is shown?

—- edit —-
Are you sure that was the Antispam plugin? Or something that relates to other plugins/server settings? Disabling the AntiSpam solves the issue? There are many cases where it seems that this error is caused by the hosting and not strictly by the plugin that sends the emails, in any case it seems something that happens after the antispam process (is a filter that evaluates the e-mail, it does not deal with sending it)
https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/error-there-was-an-error-trying-to-send-your-message/
https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/there-was-an-error-trying-to-send-your-message-please-try-again-later-140/
https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/getting-there-was-an-error-trying-to-send-your-message-please-try-again-later/

• This reply was modified 5 months, 2 weeks ago by Erik.

Hi Benjamin (@benjaminvandenberg)!

I hope you’re doing well! I’m sorry for any inconvenience caused by the lack of frequent updates; work has been quite demanding. However, I plan to release a major upgrade for this plugin and the SMTP one this summer. I’ll strive to be more consistent with updates in the future.

Regarding your queries:

1. Preventing False Positives:
   The situation you’re describing is indeed tricky because the plugin flags any instance of a “bad word” within the email content or subject. Unfortunately, the plugin does not differentiate between parts of words and full words (because i remove all the spaces and special chars from the email), so “offer” in “offerte” will be flagged, and will be flagged also “o f f e r t” or “off e rt”. To mitigate this, I recommend avoiding short words that are likely to appear in other contexts. You might consider focusing on longer or more specific terms that are less likely to cause false positives.
2. Using an English List on a Dutch Website:
   The effectiveness of using an English bad word list depends on the nature of the spam you receive. If most of your spam is in English, it makes sense to use an English bad word list. However, if you receive significant amounts of spam in Dutch, you might need a Dutch list as well.
3. Recommended English Bad Words List:
   Here are some strategies you might find useful, keep in mind that you can change the warning score in the main plugin page (you can find the settings under advanced):

• High Warning Score (>0.6): Use specific phrases or names associated with spam, such as “Eric Jones” or “START EARNING NOW”.
• Low Warning Score (<0.2): Use more generic words that are commonly associated with spam, such as “guaranteed,” “winner,” “bonus,” and “urgent.” Additionally, I sometimes create custom rules for frequent spam patterns. For example, if you notice a common spam pattern (like emails with the same subject or a sentence), you can block those more effectively.
  
  When the score reach 1 the email is considered spam, tune your custom settings according with this. If you want to ban with 5 bad words, you have to set a warning score of “0.2”. And remember that the score of all tests is added up so “3 bad words” and “2 fingerprints” failed will ban the IP address as well

I found this article with some interesting ideas for the bad words list

As always, thank you for your support and for using my plugin! ??

Kind regards,
Erik

Ah ok, thanks @cccjonathan for the report!

for reference here is the reason, I’ll look into it as soon as possible!

Ah, sorry, I forgot to specify this. The blacklist refers to when an IP address has already been banned and attempts to connect again, which increases its ban time. At this point that number you see (e.g. 12 in you case) its the blacklist score, which is decreased over time (see the unban routine, which decreases this score by 1 at regular intervals until the IP address is ‘unbanned’).

To find out the reason for the ban, you need to look at the first email he sent. Since the IP address was blacklisted, subsequent emails are no longer checked (this is why the log reports ‘blacklisted’ and not the real reasons).

Hello @technicallyproduct,

Are you using Flamingo? If so, you should be able to access the feature you’re asking about, as CF7 Antispam adds some additional functionality to Flamingo.

To find this information, navigate to the Flamingo plugin, then go to Inbound Messages > Spam > Status (located in the sidebar). At the end of the metabox, you will find the “Spam log” which lists the failed tests. The spam score is calculated based on the user presets configured in the CF7 Antispam “Advanced Settings.” This option is visible after enabling it with the related checkbox.

Could you please kindly show me the content of the second tab? To be clear: the content that is sent by e-mail is shown in that tab, whereas in the first one (the one you screenshotted) is what is displayed in the website frontend

about your issue are you sure to have compiled in the right way the second tab of the contact form 7 mail configuration?

please check this help page
https://contactform7.com/setting-up-mail/

Tip: To ensure that you have used all the tags you have placed in the email, check that all the fields above ‘to’ are in gray and not in black. If they are black, it means they are not used, and most likely you need to copy that tag into the email template