Most of us want people to contact us through our websites, and that's fine and normal.

However sadly, spammers want to use your website contact form to send you bucket loads of junk.

So most website owners install captcha or something like that to cut own on the automated junk that comes, and it mostly does a great job.

However some manual spam still comes through, that is where people manually type in your form, fill the captcha field in and so you still get some junk which you don't want.  There's nothing much we can do about that smaller amount of junk, and we usually just delete it.

However here is how you might accidentally spam...

If your website is setup to send an auto-reply to those contact form enquiries, you will have people who contact you, often using a fake email address, or a gmail, yahoo, live or hotmail address, and when you send your auto-reply, you are now sending a "spam reply."   Because you are replying to a junk request, to a "bad email" or a "fake email" you are now sending what has come to be called "backscatter."  

This backscatter, a type of spam, clogs up the internet in other ways, and can get your IP address blocked and give your website a nasty reputation.

So there are two things we can do about this:

  1. Make sure you definitely have a captcha on your website contact form.
  2. Make sure you don't send a reply to an automated enquiry - simply paste a thank you message on your website to let them know you received their mail.  And that's it.  

If you would like WTQ Hosting to investigate your website to cut down on backscatter, please contact us using our contact form :)



Thursday, September 19, 2019





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