Stop Spam emails with Recaptcha 3

Nov 03, 2019

Dealing with spam emails also known as ‘junk mail’ can be frustrating and time consuming. These unsolicited messages, often sent in bulk can harbour viruses or other malicious content and are designed by spammers and cybercriminals to collect your personal information. If you have been getting a lot of spam emails recently this article explains how spammers try to collect your information https://securelist.com/spam-and-phishing-in-q1-2019/90795/

In contrast, the reason there are so many form-submitted spam emails is in the attempt to perform automated ‘link-building’. These robots complete any form on the web in hopes that it will provide a backlink to improve site authority. Unfortunately, most website forms are not directory, forum links or blog comments so many of these attempts are futile.

How to deal with spam emails?

1. Try to avoid opening spam emails and clicking on links in spam messages. 
2. Don't buy anything from a spammer. 
3. Don't be tempted to reply. 
4. Don't threaten the spammer. 
5. Avoid 'unsubscribe' options. 
6. Be wary about giving out your main email address. 
7. If it’s spam just delete it. 
8. To report an email scam, go to https://www.scamwatch.gov.au/
   

To combat and reduce the amount of spam emails received through forms Google has developed ‘Captcha’. Captcha is a small piece of code that gets added to forms on your website eg. your ‘contact us form’ and helps to stop automated software (spam bots) from accessing and submitting forms.

Captcha ensures that a form submission is actually being completed by a human and in the standard Captcha process an image is created for verification on the fly (using a character code) which the spam bots have trouble reading.

The latest reCaptcha 3 is now available for all Treepl websites and is a fantastic upgrade from previous versions as it doesn’t require customers to complete any verification fields but instead verifies if an interaction is legitimate using a hidden Javascript.

There have been some reported issues with the reliability of reCaptcha 2 and it is hard for customers to use, often causing a dropout in form submissions, so if you are still using reCaptcha 2 or reCaptcha https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/docs/versions we can upgrade your webforms and make it easier for customers to complete.

If you would like to update to reCaptcha 3 or discuss the best way to deal with spam emails coming from a form on your website send us an email or give us a call on 02 4975 3954.