Email Marketing & Automation

How to Guarantee Your Site is Blacklisted for Email

We were reviewing one of our clients’ sites today. They’re going to be moving to our email integration soon – which is a good thing. I’m guessing their websites are probably already blacklisted… here’s why…

They have a contact form on their website. It’s nice enough, a bunch of fields to send all your personal info to them to sign up for their email initiative. A closer look, though, and it’s really simply a tool they’ve put out for spammers to take advantage of.

<FORM name="form1" method="post">
<INPUT type=hidden value="contact" name="what" />
<INPUT type=hidden value="http://myspamalink.com" name="sitename" />
<INPUT type=hidden value="7" name="site" />
<INPUT type=hidden value="7" name="client_code" />
<INPUT type=hidden value="contact" name="formname" />
<INPUT type=hidden value="anyone@someone.com" name="sendto" />
<INPUT type=hidden value="http://www.somepage.com" name="nextpage" />

Notice the hidden fields where you can input an email address! As a test, I pulled the form, put my email address on it, and put a link in the other hidden field. I clicked submit and a minute later, I had a SPAM email in my inbox!

This is how spammers can continue to send email without worrying about getting blocked. All they need to do is find a form like this on your website and they can script a process that pushes millions of emails through overnight. Who gets blocked? Not the spammer… the company does!

This specific form is on a website of a billion dollar business, not a small business. And there are thousands of these types of insecure forms everywhere on the net. The irony here is that they did it on an ASP page – a page that could have easily done a lookup for email addresses at the server and appended them.

In case you’re wondering, of course we’ve told them!

Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is CMO of OpenINSIGHTS and the founder of the Martech Zone. Douglas has helped dozens of successful MarTech startups, has assisted in the due diligence of over $5 bil in Martech acquisitions and investments, and continues to assist companies in implementing and automating their sales and marketing strategies. Douglas is an internationally recognized digital transformation and MarTech expert and speaker. Douglas is also a published author of a Dummie's guide and a business leadership book.

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