My tech manager thinks I should explain the importance of your Civic Clarity website service’s online form submission spam catching process, and why you need to check your form’s spam folders.  So, here it goes.  But first, there’s a link at the bottom for a one-question poll – don’t miss it!

Your website’s online forms store their submissions in the website’s backend and also email the submissions to you.  The Civic Clarity website service has a top-of-the-line process to insure the integrity of your website. When a form is filled out and submitted, our system reviews the message for content or IP reputation and either sends it or marks it as spam.  Spam messages are placed in the form’s spam folder inside your website.  Messages in the form’s spam folder are not emailed to you and can only be seen through the back end of your website.

If we turned off this internal review process and allowed spammy messages to be sent to you, your website could very possibly get a spammer reputation from email providers and soon you wouldn’t receive any submissions to your mailbox as your email service would flag anything coming from your website.  In this case, all the submitted forms would live in the backend of the website as unable to be delivered – both good and spam messages.   As you can see, we have to have a spam protocol to safeguard both your website and our service from negative reputations.

Spam is a never ending problem that we take very seriously.  As you suspect, there are a multitude of ways to fight spam.  For example, you’ve all experienced CAPTCHA.  CAPTCHA is a process where you ask the form sender to jump through a small hoop by doing a simple math problem, pick a series of pictures, see numbers and letters in an image, or something similar.  We moved away from CAPTCHA due to the increased threat of hacker infiltration.  It is also considered a negative experience for the form submitter and we are focused on your form being as easy as possible for the submitter to submit.

To summarize: the purpose of this email is threefold.

One – education.

Two – a request for you to check your website’s spam folder on a regular basis. By marking a messages in the spam folder as NOT SPAM you are training our system on what is considered spam. It also puts the message into your form’s inbox where you can send it to your email mailbox if wanted.

Three – we are considering creating a way to email you a notification that a form submission has been put into the form’s spam folder. For some, you’d get numerous notifications daily. We could not show very much revealing fields of these emails because if they are spam, the message would ultimately be marked as spam and not get to you.  Let us know your opinion by clicking answering this one question poll.

To save you time, here’s the question:  Do you want AccuNet to create a process to automatically email you a notification that an online form submission has been placed into the form’s spam folder?

Civic Clarity takes the task of protecting you from spam very seriously.  Our ultimate goal is your satisfaction.  Let us know how we’re doing!