Reduce spam

Webforms are great- they give visitors to your website a convenient and easy way to get in touch with you. Unfortunately they’re also a target for spam; but you’ll be glad to know there’s an effective way to greatly reduce or even eliminate this!

You’ll be familiar with spam emails: they’re a bit like the hoards of junk mail you’ll get through your letterbox at home, and it’s estimated that 7 trillion spam messages were sent last year (2011)!

Webform spam is similar but webforms can be used for more than just email (things like blog comments, mailing list subscription, etc.) so they’re an even more attractive target for spammers.

A simple email address on your website can be encrypted (and always is, for my clients) which will protect you from low-level spammers. Your contact form, or any other webforms are similarly tricky for low-level spammers to reach you through, but when it comes to the more heavy-duty spam-bots (automated spam programs) and even human spammers (usually under-paid workers in internet cafés), something similarly heavy-duty is called for…

Your email mailbox will have a filtering system built in to catch any spam emails you receive from those that have managed to get a hold of your email address, in spite of its encryption, but there is no such filter for your webforms as they are all sent from your own website, via your own servers and are therefore seen as safe, which is where a filtering system comes in.

If you’ve been receiving a few too many spam emails via your contact form, you don’t want to spend time discerning spam from non-spam comments on your blog, or you don’t want to have to face any spam at any point down the line, please give me a shout and I’ll be happy to set a filtering service up for you.

I should mention that I don’t take any commission for the admin of your account- I charge you what it costs me and will invoice you along with your yearly domain name and hosting renewal, so that it’s all taken care of at once.