Reducing Email Spam

Reducing Email Spam

A client recently contacted me about the large amount of spam emails he’d been receiving through the contact form on his website. Sure enough, when I took a look at his email, he’d been receiving 30-40 every day. They were all ads for various designer purses or other products.

The site was using GoDaddy’s webformmailer script to handle emailing of the forms on the site. I found a php script that uses captcha and implemented it on both of the forms that the website uses. Next I renamed the webformmailer script. When I checked a few days later, spam was down to about one per day. I found that some spam was still being received from cached versions of the html pages that used the scripts. Next step was to submit a request through Google Webmaster Tools to remove the old version of the pages. The client is now reporting that little or no spam emails are being received.

I do recommend contact forms versus just putting your email address on your website since spambots will pick up your email address and bombard you with spam.