Tired of Getting Spam Bot Subscribers?

Britt Malka

Aug '23 • Value Bomb 💣

Or Spam Bot comments to your contact form?

Oh wow!

You’ve just gotten 50 new subscribers to your email list. Yay, right? You celebrate…

Until you find out, they are all fake.

Disappointing, yes. But this is more than just annoyance. Those fake subscribers cause trouble.

You need to get rid of them and stop them from coming in.

Why You Need to Get Rid of Those Fake Subscribers

Fake subscribers will have fake email addresses.

When somebody gives you a wrong email address, and your auto responder sends them an email, there’s no receiver. And the email will “bounce.”

A bounce means that the email is returned to you with an error message.

Let’s say your spam bot gave you the email address spambot @ gmail dot com. Gmail will see that this address doesn’t exist. Your email has no receiver. It will return your email and tell you, “This email doesn’t exist.”

That happens once in a while when a new subscriber by mistakes gives you the wrong email address.

Maybe they make a typo and didn’t notice. They wrote gamil instead of gmail. Or they added a letter too many in the first part (briitt instead of britt).

An email can also bounce if the receiver’s mailbox is full.

It’s natural to get a few bounces. As an email copywriter, you cannot tell your subscribers to delete emails in their accounts. You can do your best to educate them about being careful when they type in their address.

But in the end, errors happen.

Something else happens when you send out a bunch of emails to fake subscribers. Your bounce rate will be high. And that leads to:

Bad deliverability

Even bans from your ESP (Email Service Supplier)

You certainly won’t want that, so you need to stop those bots from subscribing in the first place.

Is CAPTCHA the Solution?

“We need to know if you’re human. Select all the motorcycles in this image.”

Argh, not again! Those CAPTCHAs are annoying. Often you have to pick many pictures with motorcycles, buses, cycles and traffic lights before it’s satisfied.

Or worse — CAPTCHA’s “pick pictures with a bike’s” evil twin brother…

What characters do you see here? All you see are twisted lines… Is that a zero or the letter O?

In short: CAPTCHAs are freaking annoying to humans.

If you start by asking your hopefully new subscriber to jump through hoops and pick traffic lights galore, he may leave instead.

The spam bots, on the other hand…

Can they get through? I suspect yes. But maybe not.

In either case, you’ve stopped humans from subscribing and only maybe stopped bots.

Bad solution.

Set Up a Honeypot Instead

What is a honeypot?

It’s a red herring that fools bots into revealing itself.

Imagine the following situation.

You’re a human being (at least… I hope so…) and you see a form. The form has one or more fields you can check.

“Do you like ice cream? [ ]”

“Are you human? [ ]”

“Are you an evil spam bot? [ ]”

You, as a human being, will read the text and check the relevant boxes. I’m guessing the first two…

A bot will see the fields and check all three.

The third one is almost a honeypot. We’ll just need to add one element. We want to make sure that humans don’t see it…

We make that third field hidden.

Then suddenly, no matter what the text says, we know that if someone checks that field, they cannot be human. Only bots will see it and only bots can add the code that checks off that field.

How Do You Add a Honeypot Field?

If you’re not a programmer, you may wonder about this.

Check if your ESP offers this feature. When you set up your opt-in form, do they tell you you can add a honeypot? If they do, then add it.

If they don’t…

Then you’re on your own. Almost. Here’s what I do.

I’ve installed Breakdance.

Breakdance is a page builder. You can use it to create your WordPress theme, too, but that’s another story. Breakdance can add a honeypot field to every form you create with it.

That means opt-in forms.

Yay, no more spam bots.

It also means contact forms and all other forms you choose to add to your blog.

It’s super-simple and just take one click to add a honey pot field to your form. That feature alone makes Breakdance super-valuable.

That is the best solution I’ve found to guard yourself from evil spam bot subscribers.

And it doesn’t annoy real human beings.

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