Form submissions encountering spam

[vvannoy]

Is there anyother way to reduce spam form submissions besides using the captcha form. We have implemented the captcha but junk submissions with gmail and other emails addresses are still coming in. Does Hubspot have any other spam tools I can use? Thank you

[TomM2 · Accepted solution]

Hey @vvannoy it's important to note reCaptcha isn't a spam prevention tool, it's a *bot* detection tool. It only detects perceived bot activity and challenges it. It's easy to equate bots to spam since bots are usually used to spam, but they're not a 1:1 comparison. 

For example I could personally hire 50 people off a service like fiverr to submit your form every 2 mins each with their information. Not bots, but definitely spam. 

As others have mentioned, blocking free email addresses is definitely a huge benefit in this, but not suitable for every business. If you're B2C that's not really an option. 

Unfortunately getting spam is just a consequence of having a public facing place for someone to contact you (such as a form). It's relavtively impossible to determine the intentions of someone submitting a form prior to adding them to your CRM. 

There are some options to try minimise this though! There's a great suggestion from a great community member Dan Moyle on this post here. 

[OPerek-Clark]

Hi @vvannoy,

Thanks for submitting your question! I believe there are a couple options you could look into to help with spam form submissions.

1. If you're receiving a high volume of spam via free email addresses, you can choose to block those from being submitted on your forms. See how here.
2. You can also more closely monitor spam submissions via a newer functionality where you can receive spam submissions and determine what to do next with the individual. See how here.

Let me know if this was helpful!

[Whathcock]

Hi @vvannoy ,

HubSpot has a feature that allows you to block contacts with free email addresses from submitting the form (you can see a list of all the addresses they block here).

See below, or check out this article, for how to turn this feature on for your forms:

You can block either specific email domains or HubSpot's default list of free domains on your forms. When a visitor attempts to enter a blocked domain in the Email field on your form, they will see a message asking them to enter a business email address.

To block email domains on a HubSpot form: 

• In your HubSpot account, navigate to Marketing > Lead Capture > Forms.
• Hover over a form and click Edit. 
• In the form editor, hover over the Email field and click the edit edit icon.
• In the Email domains to block field, enter the domains you want to block.
  • Each domain should be separated by commas.
  • Enter only the root domain without the www prefix or @ symbol. For example, enter gmail.com, not www.gmail.com or @gmail.com.
• To block HubSpot's default list of free domains, select the Block free email providers checkbox.
• In the top right, click Update or Publish. 
  
  

Hope this helps,

Whitney