Spam Prevention on Forms

[monique062579]

Please add a way to add spam prevention to the default contact forms. I am getting quite a bit of spamnow but in order to stop this from happening I would have to use an outside program. It justs makes it easier if it was in 3d carts platform. Thank you.

[RobertFranz]

Speaking from the standpoint of both a web shopper and an email administrator, I'd say spam prevention on forms isn't all that hot of an idea.

We have some email addresses listed on our site, and it's always generated a fair amount of spam.

We had an exchange server, and I had multiple filtering options enabled, but I was still spending a couple hours a day manually updating filters and releasing valid email caught by the spam traps.

We finally went with an outsource email provider - webmail.us - and now I never deal with spam at all. A trickle still gets through, but it's low enough that my users can deal with that themselves.

As a shopper and all around geek, I find it annoying when I hit one of those forms where I have to squint at a graphic intended to be difficult to read.

I have been known to bail at that point when I have multiple vendors to choose from. Not as quick as "call for price" - I'll never ever bother with that - but it's still a dissatisfier for me.

[monique062579]

Yeah it bothers me to but I thought that was the only way to keeo the spam bots from seding me all this junk. I will try that software you suggested. Thanks.

[RobertFranz]

You know, as I think about this, I may have been entirely offbase.

I always forget that some people using the cart software may not have their own mail server or mail host and are using the email functionality provided by 3dcart.

Given that they have taken on the task of providing email, I would then have to take the position that they should also provide some sort of filtering capability, whether or not it would be an extra cost option.

If spam continues to be a problem, you may want to consider having your store email forwarded to gmail, as it provides exellent spam filtering.

Webmail.us is a good choice if you have an organization that's a little bigger.
We have 70-odd mail enabled users, so our cost per box is only $1.50/month.

For smaller organizations, it might not work so well since there is a 10 mailbox minimum, and at that level the cost is $3/month/box. So you'd be looking at $30/mo. Not a bad deal if you really need 10 mailboxes with really good filtering and a 10 gig limit. But pretty costly if all you really need is one mailbox.

We have to have as close to absolute reliability as possible, so it's worth it to us to outsource our email to someone with a department that is tasked specifically with nothing but dealing with spam all day long.

There are other providers out there that may have lower minimums, or you may want a good spam filtering software that runs locally.

Most antivirus software these days has some sort of spam filtering built in.
I would check your antivirus and see if perhaps you already have something that just needs to be turned on or configured.

If you don't already have an antivirus, I would strongly suggest getting something.

FYI: If you're on a mac, you still need antivirus.

I know of no virus found in the wild that has successfully infected OSX.
However, there are many macro viruses that will attach themselves to MS Office documents, turning your Mac into an embarassing Typhoid Mary when - not if - it passes a macro virus on to a Windows machine.

Apologies for the length...this was *supposed* to be a Quick Reply, but sometimes I start typing and can't shut up.

[rrw]

After being relatively free of it for a few months, I've just started getting several submissions daily of something like this:

"Hello, its nice to see wonderfully things like these to advitise our country world wide. cod4 server cracked cracked servers cod4 .no cracked server list . . . [/url] See you", etc. (going on for MANY lines)

submitted to our "Contact Us" page several times a day. Problem is, now the "contact us" submissions are flagged as spam, and I have to check each one individually to see if it is legit or not.

I wish nothing but heartache in the lives of those *!)##&'s who spend their lives sending out this crap!

[bristweb]

i believe 3dcart will have reCAPTCHA or something similar implemented for v3

[rrw]

I awoke this morning to 25 spam emails from our "contact us" page--I really need a solution! *@!!sk(&#'ing spammers!

[jhb]

I would second the gmail account. You can even set it up to retrieve POP mail from 3dCart so it is grabbing it straight from the server. It will also send out mail using your actual 3dCart email address as well. We get a lot of spam, but I do not see most of it because of this. I use my same gmail account for 3 different email addresses and I believe you can retrieve from up to 5 POP mail accounts.

Jeff

[jenms]

I would also like to have a CAPTCHA incorporated into the contact form. We have only been live on 3DCart for 3 months and are just now beginning to get some spam through our contact form.