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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