What are the potential consequences of not implementing spam protection in PHP contact forms?

Without implementing spam protection in PHP contact forms, you run the risk of receiving a large number of spam submissions, which can clutter your inbox and waste your time filtering through them. This can also lead to potential security risks if malicious content is included in the spam submissions. To prevent this, you can implement captcha verification or honeypot fields in your PHP contact form to effectively block spam submissions.

// Example of implementing a simple honeypot field in a PHP contact form
if(!empty($_POST['honeypot'])) {
    // This is a spam submission, ignore it
    exit;
}

// Process the rest of the form submission
// Your code here...