Thread

Hi!

So this may be beyond and EE question but all my google searching isn’t giving me any anwers…

About once a week I get an email with subject of “Re: Email Confirmation” from a mailing list sign up… wit h a real person saying something like “HEY! I didn’t sign up for this” or “Take me off your list!” etc.

it has the standard:

Thank you for joining the “Site Mailing List” mailing list!
Please click the link below to confirm your email.
If you do not want to be added to our list, ignore this email. etc…...

To which I reply something like “Sorry for the trouble - just don’t click the link and you’re not signed up” 

Some people spaz out and click the link and then get upset when they get signed up. I then have to remove them.

I have had a higher than normal number of sign ups lately and more unsubscribes than usual when I send out emails.

Why or how are real emails getting added to my email list? I don’t see any reason this might be an advantage to some spammer or bot or whatever…

*bump*

Any ideas? I just had it happen again to someone who complained about it a few days ago….

If you have a signup form for a mailing list, then any robot can chuck any random email address it has on file into it to see what happens. The robot doesn’t know/care about the confirmation loop, and once it submits, it thinks it might get an address that it can use to spam whatever list the signup is for. Don’t try to figure out the logic of spammers and their robots, it’s just maddening. Once you get your form field on a list, they’ll keep attacking it.

Unfortunately, you can’t add a captcha field to the mailinglist signup. I guess EL figures that a confirmation loop is good enough to weed out spammers, but as you have witnessed, obviously it isn’t. You might be able to come up with a creative way to mask the form or distract the robot. If you do, let us know.

-jim