EmailMarketingMentor.com - Practical Marketing Tips, Techniques & Resources » Fighting Spam

Stop Spammers: Lock Down Your Tell-A-Friend Form

Karl Barndt — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 22:01:40 +0000

Over the past several months a disturbing spam trend has emerged--spammers exploiting "tell-a-friend" forms.

In most cases, spammers use robots to fill out tell-a-friend forms with email addresses and canned spam messages and send them. Spam sent from a tell-a-friend on your website not only annoys the recipients, but can be a source of spam complaints against your domain.

If your domain registrar (especially GoDaddy.com) receives enough complaints, they can seize your domain and shut down your website. Complaints filed with your web host can result in the suspension of your hosting account.

Protection against these spammers is easy:

Remove your form, especially if it isn't driving more traffic or customers to your website or email list.
Add a Captcha spam protection field to your form. Captcha fields require you to enter a series of numbers, letters, or words to prove you are a real person and not a spambot.
Remove the comment area of your form so users can't add a custom message to the tell-a-friend. Instead, compose a blanket message like "(sender's name) recommends this website to you." then describe briefly what your website does. Let senders know what the message says, so they know what they will be sending.

Apply just one of these suggestions and you'll cut spammers off at the knees.

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Video #1: Stop Spam in Your Inbox

Karl Barndt — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 03:43:35 +0000

Though this video isn't about directly about email marketing, it will help you get a handle on the flood of spam you likely receive every day (I was up to more than 300 piece of spam per day).

Since spam is a problem for everyone, I produced a 9-minute video showing how to block spam using Spam Assassin and BoxTrapper, two tools included with most cPanel webhosting accounts.

I can't imagine running my websites without cPanel (yes, I did run them without it, but no more). And if you need a webhosting account that offers cPanel, I have had great success with HostGator. Their servers are fast and support has been excellent. I have a reseller account, which allows me to set up individual cPanels for my domains.

And if your email accounts aren't hosted by your web host, you can still use this technique by forwarding your email to an email account you create in cPanel. Set up BoxTrapper and Spam Assassin according to the instructions in the video and use your cPanel email account to deliver your email.

In an upcoming video, I'll reveal a very important but little-known option you'll want to add to your webhosting that costs about $2 per month, but will improve your email delivery.