how to stop fake email address in Email List Subscription

[ozlighting]

Hi,

I think there's a program (a bot??) which is automatically signing up to our email list with fake email addresses. not sure why someone would bother, but anyway, is there a way i can stop them?

I though about putting a CAPTCHA on the email list signup form. does anybody know if that's possible?

Cheers,

Lance
(you can see the email list signup form on our homepage http://www.ozlighting.com.au

[mazhar]

If you need to check validity of Email address then simply turn on Signup Rule as opt-in with verification. This will allow people to join Email list who have valid Email addresses. Secondly where do you want to use captcha for Email list protection.

[ozlighting]

Hi Mazhar,

Thanks for your reply. We do have the signup rule as opt-in with verification, however, the issue was not that fake email addresses were being added to our list, but rather that someone was attempting to signup with fake addresses. The reason this concerned me was because all of the fake addresses were GMAIL and YAHOO email addresses, which means that for every sign-up attempt, my domain (ozlighting.com.au) was sending an email to google and yahoo to an invalid address and it was bouncing back. The only motive I could think of for someone doing something like this to me would be to try and get google and yahoo to ban or penalise my domain by listing it as a spammer. I don't even know if this is plausible but this is what I was concerned about. therefore, as a short term solution i removed the email signup form from my home page. this is why you couldn't see it when you went to our site - apologies for the confusion.

So, back to my original question which is, is there any way to prevent/block robots/programs from automatically attempting to signup to my email list? could a captcha be used?

Thanks for your help.

Cheers,

Lance

[s_ismail]

Definitely you can use Captcha to prevent robots or any other automated programs by just going on admin-->Password Policy -->Customer Policy.

[mazhar]

Yes captcha can be used to avoid bots, but I don't think so that its available on Email list sign up. On OnePageCheckout I guess it supports NoBot control. You can turn it on by setting DisableBots="true".

[ozlighting]

Hi Mazhar,

Thanks for your reply. I'm not sure I understand, do you mean that if I set DisableBots to TRUE in OnePageCheckout that this will stop this bot from bombing my site? are they related somehow? I added the email signup form back to my homepage and within a couple of hours the fake email signups started again at intervals of three minutes. Is there a way to find out the IP address of the bot to block it? Also, if I set DisableBots to true, would this stop google and yahoo from reaching my site as well?

Thanks for your help

[mazhar]

Forget about DisableBot setting. I thought may be you are having some problem on checkout Email signups. I guess if list signup is on home page then best way is to apply captcha on it. Here is the modified version of SubscribeToEmailList control with captcha support. All you need is to extract it. It contains two files place them under ConLib/Custom folder. Then use this control where you want to show your signup. For example

Code: Select all

[[ConLib:SubscribeToEmailList EmailListId="1"]]

[ozlighting]

Thanks Mazhar,

you're always really helpful and you definitely add a LOT of value to the Ablecommerce community.

Kind regards,

Lance