It’s no secret that spammers are continually looking for ways to deliver their messages.
And, while business owners do everything they can to keep their websites safe, spammers’ ingenuity always seems to find vulnerabilities.
Why Do Spammers Want to Use Your Site to Deliver Spam?
The CAN-SPAM Act passed in 2003, yet it would be virtually impossible to find anyone with an email who believes that spam is not still a major issue. In fact, for most of us, it’s gotten progressively worse. That’s because spammers’ low-cost, high-volume activities can generate as much as $7000 per day.
With minimal regulations and lax enforcement, preventing spam has been left largely to individual companies. This leaves spammers plenty of room to continually evolve their practices, identifying and exploiting any way to get their messages into the most inboxes.
Your website can be one of the easiest ways for spammers to deliver their messages.
That’s because emails that come from a reputable company are more likely to get past spam filters.
You’ve spent time and money creating a website that achieves your goals and creates trust in your visitors. Spammers leverage that reputation to get into your customers’ inboxes and to deliver their own messages. Your hard-earned reputation can be irreparably damaged in the process.
How Spammers Use Your Website
The history of spam is truly one of iteration and innovation, a never-ending back and forth between genuine commerce and unscrupulous activity. Each time their efforts get blocked, spammers find a new channel to take advantage of.
One of the common ways being used currently involves forms on your website. Forms can be used for many purposes, such as signing up for newsletters or updates, providing customer service, or getting valuable feedback.
In short, forms can be very useful – but they can also be an avenue for spammers.
In the past, companies have had to deal with spammers bombarding them with hundreds or thousands of fake email addresses with exploitative messages through their online forms. As a way of preventing spammers from using their own forms to spam them, companies now generally require users to confirm their email address. Used properly, this does a few things:
- It ensures that the user actually completed the form.
- It minimizes the flood of spam into the companies’ own email systems.
However, spammers have found a way to exploit the confirmation process for their own purposes. They simply complete a form on your site using their target’s legitimate email address, but enter their own advertising message into the form’s name field. When the unsuspecting target receives the registration confirmation email, it appears to come from a legitimate company – but it contains the spammer’s message.
As an example, let’s say that my website allows visitors to register for updates using their email address and name. To ensure that the email address provided is legitimate, I send them a registration confirmation email that says, “Hello, {name} – Thank you for registering. Please confirm your email address.”
Spammers can complete the same form on my site, using the legitimate email addresses of their targets but adding their own message in the name field. The target (who may have never even visited my site) gets a message that appears to be from me but delivers the spam message. “Hello, {spammer message here}.”
Reputation Damage From Spam
You’ve spent time, energy, and money building your company’s reputation. That reputation can be easily tarnished if a recipient of an unwanted spam email doesn’t know that it’s not from you.
Consider a few possible scenarios:
- The recipient of the spam email has engaged with your company in the past, so they naturally assume the email is legitimate. They open it, only to find spam or even a phishing scam.
- The recipient of the email does not know you, recognizes the messages as spam, and blocks any future messages from their inbox.
- The recipient reports the email as spam, possibly raising flags with email providers about all emails coming from you.
As you can see, the potential fallout can be very problematic.
Just How Serious Is This?
It’s estimated that email spam costs businesses over $20 billion every year. This particular scheme may be just one of many, but it is lucrative enough that spammers have actually been advertising it as a service.
Considering how easily and quickly the reputation you have developed can be tainted, it makes sense to take this issue seriously.
SpamBurner allows you to say goodbye to website spam forever. I started SpamBurner because we manage over 400 websites, and our clients have all too often been deluged with so much spam that true leads get lost in the shuffle.
Until now, there hasn’t really been a good solution.
Filter out the spam so you can focus on real customers.
SpamBurner is the only tool that allows you to see all your website leads in one place, while separating out the good from the bad. You can connect SpamBurner to any website with virtually no effort and immediately start to block 99% of spam.
