Hello, I am a new user to Mautic. My apologies in advance if I am posting this question in the wrong area of the Community Forums.
We have a sign up page where prospective customer enter their information as CONTACTS. The signup function is working properly and new CONTACTS are being added each day. However, quite a few of the new CONTACTS are bogus names. It is obvious by reading their email address as many are either pornographic names for their email address and many of them have the same “first name” and “last name” when they sign up on our form. For example their name may be listed as “Davis Davis” and their email address is davisdavis@hotgirls.com.
What is the best way to handle such contacts. Should they simply be deleted or should they be identified as spam or is there some way we can prohibit them from returning to the site and adding their name again.
Double Opt-In. When a user signs up and submits your form, you send an email to the email address they provided in the form. The email you send would contain a verification link. The user is not entered into your contacts unless they open their email and click on verify link in the email you sent to them. This is fairly common method in the industry. Here is a URL with some information about this Creating a Double Opt-In Email Campaign
You can add capability to your form to validate the users email as soon as it is entered. If it is a fake email address then the form cannot be submitted. This is a custom solution that we provide. You can learn more at https://www.quixtec.com/form-email-validation/ .
Hello Richard, Thank you for your thoughtful response. We are currently doing a double opt-in process… however we are not blocking these unwanted names from the mist. That is a good idea bit we will have to figure out the steps to implement this approach. I think we can figure that out.
Regarding your custom solution, this seems like a cleaner approach and we will take a look at your solution in more detail. My guess is your solution is popular due to how prevalent of a problem this would seem to be. I was a little surprised we did not see this issue mentioned anywhere… maybe we were looking in the wrong place for info.
This is very much discussed in multiple places also in this forum. (look for “form spam”)
There are ways to counter this issue.
Most likely there is something common in these subscribers: they all submitted a field without visiting a page. If your tracking is properly set, this is impossible, unless a bot does it. (or api, but let’s assume you don’t use this method.)
Steps to counter:
Add a tag by using a form action (e.g. newsletter subscriber)
Create a segment, that checks who is bogus based on the criteria above:
