Wordpress Contact mail still being sent from a "trashed" form

Having deleted most of my test contact forms from my old Wordpress account and website I am now (April 2024) getting emails from that form. This is strange as the form is obviously there on the Wordpress server but in a ..../trash folder.

The reply on the Wordpress support page

The advice given to a query that a Wordpress user that was seeing this in March 2023 was that the spam email was coming from another source i.e. not the Wordpress website.

As you can see on the image of the email above the name of the file that sent the email is echoed to the message as a footer. This is the way that Wordpress forms work as a default. If the email was in fact "from another source" why would the spammer add this footer?

An Admin that had created the contact form would know that this email was spam and where it came from. A spammer would surely omit this from the spam and the email is more likely to have come from an actual Wordpress form and NOT a re-construction.

The question to the Wordpress support desk:

The reply from the Plugin Author:

This is another example of why I gave up using Wordpress! I am not sure if this a new problem so this post to see if anyone else finds it.

Where I had seen spam before

When I ran a wordpress.org website I was appalled by the amount of spam that I was getting on contact and other forms, even regular blog posts. This was before Wordpress implemented AKisMet as a standard plugin

I had also seen some pretty disturbing spam on the Village Hall website. In this case the spam was captured and quarantined by AKsiMet and was in a Spam folder of the feedback, as seen on the Wordpress interface.

This also reminds me that it is not likely that an inexperienced Wordpress Admin will know that this spam is present on their website. The same can also be said about the fact that their site is under attack on a hourly basis.

Wordpress say that deleted files will be removed from trash after 30 days

They also say that they are also removed from the server.

Permalink Issue

Doing more digging this could be a Permalink problem. See the link below
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/wordpress-permalinkslug-changed-page-to-page_trashed/ the reply to the question on the WP support forum is quite long.

The response on the Wordpress site seems to relate this to items being added and deleted from a menu???? I had done that.

Whatever the problem is the email was sent from a form that I had been working on previously. There could be a chance that the current admin of the site had been experimenting with contact forms or menus. Strangely I think that this was the case as the re-direction and the website is down as I write this!

If this is the case I will be interested to see what happens with menus when I can finally see them, if I ever do.