Written: August 7, 2019

Reducing the amount of SPAM email sent from web contact forms

My business clients love it when prospects or customers contact their web forms, which then sends an email message, But what do you do when a malicious person has a bot that is visiting your contact pages and filling out bogus web forms?

Who wants to receive that many bogus email message?

Our friends at Google have managed to figure out a way that auto-detects when a computer bot fills out your forms, instead of a human, and they call that technology reCAPTCHA. Best of all, this technology is free to use.

For my WordPress client web sites I typically use a plugin for forms called Contact Form 7, and it has a net integration with Google reCAPTCHA. So, my first step is to browse https://google.com/recaptcha/ and then add my client web site, which then generates two keys:

I just click the Copy Site Key, then over in WordPress I find Contact> Integration, then paste in the two values:

Once those two keys are installed, then I just browse the client site, and double check that the special Google icon appears in the lower-right corner of every web page, telling me that I’m protected from most SPAM fields.