Stop Spam Emails Reaching You from Online Forms

Many websites need to provide a way for customers to contact them whether it is for enquiries or purchases, and there is often a variety of contact options available such as email, phone or fax. This is great as clients often feel more confident knowing that there is a person behind the website that they can contact and ask advice from. This may also indirectly lead to more conversions on your site.

Online forms are a great way for customers to leave their contact details along with their enquiry at any time of the day or night. It also makes any enquiries more manageable as you can organise your emails and ensure that the correct response is issued to the correct enquirer.

Although these online forms will generate genuine client enquiries there is also the danger of the forms being used by those less scrupulous and you could find your mail box full of spam emails, making it hard for you to identify the legitimate enquiries.

The solution is to use something called CAPTCHA code on your form. This technique encodes a password inside an image and asks the user to type the characters that appear in the image into a text box. You may have seen this technique used on ticket sale sites and it basically stops spambots from submitting your enquiry form and filling up your inbox with nonsense emails. By entering the capture code presented in the image, the enquirer is letting the form know that it is a human being rather than a spambot.

This code can easily be added to existing forms and will stop the headache of having to trawl through all those spam emails to get to your genuine customer enquiries.

Gemma Neesham
Natural SEO Programmer