formmail recipient error

It is suggested in Dreamhost's Formmail syntax chart, that to avoid having robots mine your email address, to just exclude the @mydomain.com from the recipient field, because the system will send it to the local domain by default.

But it doesn't work for me! I have the following line in my form:

In reply to:
<INPUT type=hidden value="myname" name="recipient">

When I try to submit the form, I get the following error message:

In reply to:
Error: Bad or missing recipient: Please make sure you have filled in the required recipient form field, and that the e-mail address used is hosted with DreamHost.

As a spam-prevention matter, we can now only allow our formmail to forward to email addresses hosted with us. If you'd like the recipient to be an email not hosted with us, please just create an address @yourdomain.com to forward there!

The recipient was: [ myname ]

whereas if I change that line of code to:

In reply to:
<INPUT type=hidden value="myname@myname.com" name="recipient">

...it works correctly.

The form is on the same domain as the recipient email addy, and is all hosted by Dreamhost.

I would really like to make this work-- what am I missing?

I'm having the same error, only changing the value doesn't make it work either. This is my code:

In reply to:
<form action="http://formmail.dreamhost.com/cgi-bin/formmail.cgi" method="POST">
<input type=hidden name="recipient" value="tony">
<div align="center">
<input type=hidden name="subject" value="Catalog Request">
<input name="Submit" type="submit" value="Submit">
<input type="reset" name="Reset" value="Reset">
</div>
</form>

Uh, it does mention on the formmail.dreamhost.com site this important bit:

"Note though, not using your full email address may result in some submissions not working.. if the user has their referrer fields stripped in their browser, or maybe are using a proxy or are behind a firewall. Use at your own risk!"

Have you checked to see if your referrer field is not getting sent?

Also, you misinterpreted how their script works.

The script is being run under the domain formmail.dreamhost.com, and thus the "local domain" as you put it will be that of the web server machine running that domain - which may not be in your cluster much less the same machine as your domain.

Their documentation doesn't say "local domain", so not sure where you got that from. It specifically says "to an email address at the same domain as your form", and again that only works if the submission includes the HTTP Referer header.

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