16+ Effective Ways to Prevent Newsletter Spam Sign Up

If you are the business owner or email marketer and you need to deal with receiving, gathering email addresses then Spam is not a new term for you. You are pretty familiar with this frustrating issue and maybe desperately seeking effective ways to get rid of this. 

You should grow your business by gaining more subscribers. In this case, you need to have signup from your website. And thus, your inbox gets filled with spam emails and newsletters. 

Undoubtedly, this situation makes the inbox look clumsy and also distracts you a lot. Sometimes, these spambots fill the newsletter signup forms and include dummy emails. It may either cost money or block your ID by marking it as a spammer. 

As any technological mess requires a technical solution, our expertise has come with the most uttered and effective ways of preventing newsletter signup spam. After going through this article, you will learn how to prevent newsletter signup spam for having a healthy and spam-free inbox. 

What Is Newsletter Spam Sign Up?

Newsletter signup spam occurs by entering a bot in your email list. Bots mainly fill the forms and take a huge space in your inbox. These days it is increasing rapidly only because some spambots fill almost all sorts of forms they come across. They do it to get a response from you. 

In other words, newsletter signup spam is to distract email marketers or business owners by sending spam emails. In this case, bots are the sender who fills up online available forms indiscriminately. Users can easily find them through their domain or number based email addresses.

Importance of Preventing Newsletter Spam Sign Up?

Newsletter spam causes various problems including distracting your attention from work. In the case of email marketing, you have to pay a pretty good amount for your subscribers as it helps to grow your business. All ranked email marketing services are charged based on the list of your subscribers. These are the pretty clear answers to the question of why do bots sign up for newsletters. 

But what if, most of the subscribers are spambots. It means you end up paying money for bots. It is a notable issue and a great hamper to the business investors. Besides, paying for bot subscribers is an entire waste of money.   

Furthermore, an email spam bot is not supposed to check your mails and its mail addresses don’t even exist. In that sense, sending emails to those bot email addresses may damage your business reputation. So this is the reason you need to prevent newsletter signup spam to grow your business more healthily.

The Best 16+ Tricks to Prevent Newsletter Spam Sign Up

Here, we have come up with some incredible and effective ways to avoid spam newsletter sign up for you. Each of them are easy and you can apply them effortlessly. 

1. Using Captcha 

One of the most elementary ways of getting rid of newsletter signup spams is using CAPTCHA. Most of the expert sites suggest going for it. So CAPTCHA mainly works like a security gate. It means you need to fill out CAPTCHA before submitting any distorted letters or numbers.

There are lots of forms available that require a CAPTCHA. It is the best option so far for how to prevent bots from registering.

This step is easier for human beings than the bots. In CAPTCHA all you need to do is design an intelligent trap that will confirm that a living person is there instead of bots. It can be like typing difficult English alphabets or choosing pictures. 

2. Setting Double Opt-in Form Including Constant Contact

If you want to prevent spam without captcha, then a double opt-in form might be an amazing option. The double opt-in process is mainly for confirming sign-ups.

More elaborately, if any known or unknown email address is entered into your form, you will be notified automatically. A confirmation link will be sent to your email address.

Then you need to give access whether you want that email or not. To give access, you will need to go to their inbox ad check the link. It will verify the authenticity of that email because a bot will never be able to exceed this step. Besides, those signups which cannot complete this step, will not be included in your list. 

3. Adding Test Question to Form and Protecting Forms 

In this way, you will simply add a test question that must be very common and everyone knows the answers. This test question will help you to find whether the sign-ups are from humans or bots. As bots will not be able to answer that question, you can easily identify them.

There is an option to customize this option by including HTML. all you have to is that copy and paste that HTML code into your website. For your convenience, we have mentioned it below to learn how to stop spam registration in PHP.

<form>

Email address: <input id=email><br>

A panda is black and <br>

<input type=submit>

</form>

Make sure that, whatever question you are going to add is known to everyone. Otherwise, you may lose your potential and active subscribers.

4. Implement Time-analysis

If you are wondering why spammers register on my site, then you can implement time-analysis. Normally a form requires at least 4 to 5 seconds to fill up. The form is set in the way that the subscribers need to put their name, email address, and other additional information before confirming the subscription. So basically humans need at least a few seconds for inputting all the required data and clicking the confirm button. 

On the other hand, bots won’t get the sense of time and they will fill it immediately. As a result, you can easily verify the identity of the signups according to the time. 

More specifically, you can even adjust the passage of time, based on your forms. If you have added more forms then they will require much time to give entry. Thus, you can easily verify spam users. 

5. Adding Honey-pot

All the above processes are human accessible but honey-pot is for bots access only. Adding Honey-pot means including submissions forms that can only be filled up by bots. Real human users will not be able to fill that honey-pot submission. It simply filters the unwanted users and protects your forms. As it doesn’t require any additional steps, so the real people will not face any difficulties during signing up. 

Furthermore, honey-pot is not going to display any actual form. If somehow you get the hidden data, it will be bot sign-ups. You can easily find various codes to implement. For getting a simple or complex code, you can easily do internet exploration for preventing spam user registration.

6. Blocking Comment Spam

If you are still not clear with the fact of how to stop spam bots on my website, you can go for this option. This process is mainly for filtering out the comment spam through API. It means API activates the plugin and implements the feature. There are several options for blocking comment spam. They from time to time change the names of the files and standard URLs. Sometimes they move the pages as well. If you are looking for this sort of service then we would like to recommend AKISMET. 

7. Forming Validation After Setting Ip Address Geolocation 

Another way to prevent newsletter spam sign-up is by blocking the forms of a certain location. If you need only local subscribers, then you can simply disable the other locations with an increased spambot feature. 

Moreover, you can pinpoint their area by monitoring activity and mark all those highest risk areas. Then simply block all those areas. There are some demerits of blocking a certain area. First of all, if you block any particular location then it will be applicable for not only bots but also for real users.

Consequently, you may lose some real subscribers. Secondly, your forms won’t reach those areas and it may hamper your business as well. So we suggest you be sure first whether blocking this area creates problems or not. 

8. Using Smart Lead Verification from Data Validation

It is a kind of email verification service that will check the email addresses list. The service mainly provides for checking, removing duplicates, filtering disables email addresses, and verifying active email addresses. 

Data verification will give you access to get free quality reports that you import to your app. Moreover, you can pay for exporting high-quality email addresses. It will help you to remove spam bots from your inbox. 

9. Using Web Application Firewall

Web Application Firewall works with XSS attacks and SQL injections. These two terms are not complex at all and very easy to get. XSS attacks are mainly for injecting malicious javascript to the targeted browser and simply launch. It helps to replace the website content and makes subscribers input their data running keylogger cookies. Besides, SQL injection is also for injecting applications in SQL query. Then it simply blocks unauthorized access into the entire database.

10. Hiding Target Request 

You can easily secure your forms from spammers by not giving the option to do it. First of all, make sure that all sensitive pieces of information like account ID, list IDs are available.

Then collect the typed information of your customers that are sent by them to your server. It will help you to fill in the actual sensitive data option. Besides, it targets adding contact for sending fixed messages.

Furthermore, you can also maintain security by blocking the ones who have already filled the form. It will prevent the signing up of the same user over and over and you can easily target the spambots. 

11. IP addresses Limiting 

After setting up a limitation for a certain number of forms, you can easily track the IP addresses of the subscribers. It will help you to filter with the help of limited IP addresses. It will automatically block the users who will not be able to fill the forms within a fixed time. 

12. Blacklisting IPs

Once you get spam newsletters from certain users frequently, then you can simply put that IP address into the blacklist. Putting it on the blacklist means you will not get any more spam. It is one kind of trial method. Firstly, you need to mark the spambots or spammers, then you can track their IP address for blacklisting. 

13. Cross-Site Request Forgery 

Cross-site request forgery is one kind of malicious exploit that helps to identify unauthorized users. It requires authentic data from the users, which the web application can rely on.

All you need to do is embed the additional authentication data into the request. And from this data, the web application will be able to detect authenticity. It prevents any unwanted attacks.

14. Checking List for Suspicious or Unwanted Email Addresses or Activity

As there is no precise option to target the spambots, you need to follow some basic instructions. Firstly, you have to look for their email addresses whether they are usually looking or not. Secondly, if you find them proactive by clicking all the inks, then it is obvious that they are bots. Just applying these two methods you can easily find out the suspicious email addresses. Then delete them from your list.

If you cannot find the suspicious one then you can email or tag them. Then wait for a while to get a suitable reply from them. If you don’t get any, then clearly they are bots.

15. Mobile Number Verification

Mobile verification has become one of the most popular and easiest ways to prevent newsletter spam sign-ups nowadays. It is very easy that the user receives a verification code on their mobile phone. Then they have to put that code in a certain box. After matching the right user will get access to enter. It is a very effective and interactive method. Through this method, you can easily track the right subscriber. However, if the user doesn’t have the mobile device with him then it might be difficult to verify. 

16. Using Wufoo Subscription 

Wufoo is for displaying the CAPTCHA automatically when someone tries to abuse your subscription form. So if you forget to track the spammer, wufoo will do it automatically for you. You can easily set up a free account for up to 3 forms in a month. Moreover, it will also help you to find out who the real user is and who the spammer is. 

17. Cleaning Up Email List 

For having a clean email list, you will have to remove all inactive and suspicious email addresses from the list. You have to do it regularly. However, you need to be aware that you are not removing your regular customer. It will not only help you to remove the spammers but also the inactive customers who haven’t any interest in your business.

FAQs on Newsletter Spam Sign Up

Question 1: How do I prevent spam accounts?

Answer: There are some simple tricks to prevent spam accounts. 

1. Setting Default User Role 
2. CAPTCHA & reCAPTCHA 
3. Blocking IP address 
4. Activating email for user registration 
5. New users administrator approval 

Question 2: Why do bots sign up for newsletters?

Answer: When any abuser wants to take over any account, they try to sign up for several newsletters through bots. They assume that new emails are going to distract the target inbox from all sorts of malicious activities. 

Moreover, fake signups occur for spambots. They scour the internet that is looking for signups forms to fill in. In most of the cases, they fill up those forms with fake or real email addresses that belong to unknown or inactive users. 

Question 3: How do I stop spam email bots?

Answer: Some tricks to stop spam email bots, 

1. Whenever you find spam in the inbox just delete it for training your filter. 
2. Always keep in mind, that you are not going to respond to any of those spam emails. 
3. If somehow you manage to know before opening that the email is spam. Don’t open it and just delete it 
4. You can hide your email address as well. 
5. The third-party anti-spam filter can be another good option ‘
6. If any of the options don’t work for you then simply change your email address 

Question 4: Does ReCAPTCHA stop spam?

Answer: Yes, ReCAPTCHA prevents spam. Moreover, it also helps to stop entering into abusive sites. 

Question 5: How do you identify spam?

Answer: A common and easiest way of identifying spam is that looking into the email address. Most of the time, spam email addresses have the numbers or domain which are unrecognizable.  

Question 6: What are spam accounts?

Answer: A spam account is also known as a secondary private account. These accounts do not have any authenticity and personal references. Besides, these accounts are only created for sharing unpolished content to an exclusive group of audience.  

Question 7: What can I use instead of Captcha?

Answer: Some alternatives for CAPTCHA 

1. Text message verification 
2. NuCAPTCHA 
3. Math CAPTCHA 
4. Confident CAPTCHA 
5. Honeypot method 
6. Biometric security 
7. Play Thru 

Wrapping Up

In this 21st century, maintaining security in the online platform is one of the most major concerns. It is necessary not only to secure your data but your client’s data as well.

Once your inbox gets filled with newsletter signups, it may distract you a lot and sometimes marked your email address as a spammer.

So the very first thing you need to do is taking the necessary steps to get rid of this annoying issue. After going through our expert’s mentioned guideline, you can now avoid newsletter spam sign up in an easier way.