How To Stop Spam Email From Your Website Contact Page

Isn’t it sad that spammers lurk around every corner? You built your website and you’re trying to be helpful by providing a way for website visitors to contact you. The next thing you know, you start receiving all kinds of spam email from the contact method you made available.

Now you’re wondering how to stop spam email coming from your website.

The good news is that there are ways to stop spam email from your website. It all depends on which email contact methods you implemented. 

Website Email Contact Methods

There are typically two ways that website owners use to provide an email contact feature to their sites:

1. Email Address – They display their email address on their website.
2. Contact Form – They create an email contact form that, when submitted, sends an email to the website owner.

I always implement contact forms on my websites, and never display email addresses. You’ll see why below…

How To Stop Spam Email

Email Address Spam

One of the primary methods that spammers use to collect email addresses, is to scan web pages for them. If you place an email address directly on a web page, it is only a matter of time before that email address ends up in the spammers’ grubby paws!

If you have placed an email address on your contact page, and now you’re being flooded with spam to that email address, the only way to fix the situation is to get rid of that email address.

So, get rid of it and create a contact form that sends email to a new email address.

Contact Form Spam

Believe it or not, contact forms also get abused by spammers!

Now you’re probably thinking, “But you just said to create a contact form, and I want to get rid of spam!”

The good news is that you have much more power to control spam when using a contact form. You can severely limit, if not completely stop, automated spam bots by exploiting one of their weaknesses.

You see, automated spam bots get to online forms and fill out all the information fields. If you add an information field that is intended to stay empty, and that field has a value when you process that form, you can know that the form was filled out by a spam bot. Then simply discard the submission.

The Honeypot

Enter the Honeypot, which is a feature that does exactly that… it adds a field to your contact form that is intended to stay blank. If any value is entered in the field, the form submission is dumped!

As I have mentioned elsewhere on KuduWebsites.com, I specialize in building WordPress websites. For the contact forms on my websites, I use a very nice plugin called Contact Form 7. There is also a very nice honey pot plugin called… yes, you guessed it… Contact Form 7 Honeypot.

Once Contact Form 7 Honeypot is installed an activated, all you have to do is add a honeypot field to your contact form, and you’re done!

Akismet

To further protect your WordPress site, you can also activate the pre-installed Akismet plugin. The nice thing about Akismet is that it also protects you against comment-spam.

Captcha

I feel I must mention captcha since so many sites use it in their fight against spam. You’ve probably seen them before. You are shown a sequence of letters and numbers in an image and then have to retype that sequence correctly for the form submission to be accepted.

Captchas generally work, but I don’t like to give my website visitors a challenge, so I tend to stay away from them.

If you add a honeypot to your contact forms, whether via a plugin or some self-written code, it will go a long way to stop spam email coming from your website.

PS. Have you faced the problem of how to stop spam email coming from your website before? How did you solve it? Tell us in the comments…