Why am I getting junk emails through my website contact form?

This is called form spam and it's getting to be quite a problem.

Spammers are not content to just steal email addresses off the web. They have now figured out how to send automated programs out into the web that look for contact forms, and use these forms to send their messages to the site administrators and owners. They figure (quite correctly) that contact forms are harder to filter for spam, so you're stuck getting their emails if you want to get your real messages.

Recently many of the sites I manage were getting between 15 and 30 form spam emails per day.

A few different solutions are available, depending on how your contact form is implemented. If you search google for "contact form spam" you'll find some options.

At Circle Web Works we are now using a piece of software that encrypts the relevant form information on our contact webpages. This solution is working well so far. You can find it at http://www.webformspamprotection.com.

It's probably just a matter of time before spammers learn how to work around this solution. That's kind of the way things go in web-land, but when that happens we'll start looking for another way to fight the problem.