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Hi Andria,

The answer is "it depends". If you use Admin Tools with its Project Honeypot integration it will block most such jerks. It can't block them all.

I would suggest using a contact component with a CAPTCHA. I don't have any favourites. At some point, when I decide to get off my ass, I will write a small one for my personal use*. Still, it's not 100% accurate. There are actually companies where you can hire human spammers or human CAPTCHA solvers for a low cost. They work in a similar fashion to Amazon's Mechanical Turk, albeit for nefarious purposes.

The best approach is to have a contact form which doesn't send emails back to the user's email address. This will confuse a very small minority of users but will prevent such idiots from abusing your contact page.

Oh, for what is worth, very old versions of Joomla! (IIRC, before 1.5.10) did have a bug which allowed abusing your site as a spam gateway. This is long fixed. I have a strong suspicion you were bitten by one of these issues in the past ;)

* Actually, I am following the very long road to do this. I am writing the second version of my FOF framework so that I can easily write such an ad-hoc contact component. My goal is to implement it with four XML files and a small snippet of PHP code. Yes, I know, it's like building a lathe from raw materials in order to create a doorknob, but I have a serious flair for overkill :D

Ok, I definitely use Honeypot; I discovered it years ago when I first started fighting this losing battle, and I was really glad to see the integration in ATP.

It was the first feature I implemented, for obvious reasons ;)

I definitely use reCaptcha on my site; had those keys for years now also.  The contact form I'm currently looking at is Fox Contact, which lets you define your own fields, and I found a post in their forum describing how to make a field into a dropdown select box, so this may be the one I end up using.  I note that it has its own captcha, so I don't know if my default reCaptcha will be used in this or not; I would guess not, so I should probably use theirs.

Just remember that CAPTCHAs deter, they don't prevent, spam.

I kinda know what you mean about over-complicating; when I first wanted to find out about having a website, it seemed only logical to me to actually learn the language that creates websites, HTML and CSS, and ever since then, I simply cannot leave any kind of web thing in a "default" state, I have to customize it to suit my own aesthetic sensibility.  I've dabbled with php for quite a while now, never have really learned it, but I'm going to have to buckle down to it at some point.  The fact that it's interpretive instead of compiled, and also can be visualized immediately like HTML, could make it easier for me I guess.  Anyway, if/when you get it done, I'll be very interested; all your programs are truly excellent.  Make the subject line able to be a dropdown field!  :)

My intention is to make it possible for people with little PHP skills to develop their own (basic) components in a standardised way. This will allow them to later bring in a more skilled developer and continue the component from they point they got it, without losing time. If I can do that, I will be perfectly satisfied with my life... for at least 5 minutes :D