Spam free web forms for customer/sales inquiry

[--VQ--]

Question: We get spam on the address used by our online form for new customers. What can we do?
Asked by Gerhard Schiller of Metalco Fence and Railing

Answer
It is surprisingly easy to overcome this problem. There is a "best practice" for letting prospective clients contact you and it has many advantages over posting an email address to your contact page:

—— Mail from prospective clients never gets trapped in Held Mail
—— It avoids Spam completely without sending a confirmation email to the visitor
—— It gathers data for you to better serve the visitor
—— You are in control...Visitors get your email address only when you respond!

The method described below is so effective that many companies no longer place email addresses on business cards. It is the very best way to facilitate support inquiry or first contact from strangers.

We recommend three steps. Step #3 is optional, but greatly improves effectiveness:

• First, never use the "mailto" feature of HTML. This technique, which stages a message in the visitor's email program has been out of style for years because it feeds address-harvesting robots used by spammers and hackers.
  
  Instead, give your web form a server-side script to send the user message to you. Server scripts are different than HTML scripts because they do not show the user your email address even if they peek at the source code. Your web designer needn't be a programmer to achieve this. ISPs and hosting services offer these forms to you in scripting languages like PHP, CGI, Perl, or Java, depending upon the server. Additionally, these type of forms can be created with any web publishing suite like Front Page or Dreamweaver.
  
  
• If the address is a vqME address, you can alias it to your own address or that of a staff member. Or forward the address to your regular vqNow address, but in either case - place it on your LIST-ALLOW list. That's where the magic begins. When you receive this mail, it will trains your Personal Smart Filter to desire future mail from the same sender or even related to the sender's content. Additionally, when you write back to the new customer, his address will automatically be added to your Allow List. (Amazing! Isn't it!)
  
  For a discussion of custom addresses and the list serve list, click here or here. [vqNow version]
  
  
• OPTIONAL (but highly recommended):
  Steps 1 and 2 will end your email spam problem, but gradually, you will begin to see another problem. Robots will begin filling in your form with adds for viagra and body enhancement - simply to get your attention (it's totally ludicrous - isn't it?!). To overcome this problem, add a word challenge to the form itself. New customer prospects will see this only once and they will readily understand and accept the need for it. It is rapidly becoming standard practice for first time contact on the web.
  
  There is a totally free "Captcha" challenge that you can easily plug into any web form. It even benefits a good cause... It is from the massive Amazon project to digitize everything that has ever been published throughout history. We use it on our own web support form. For details, check out the Recapture Project

Once you use a hidden address, the Vanquish List-Serve feature and a "Captcha" on your web form, you will never go back to the old way of first contact.