We have added 2 new spam filter options, and also a way to bypass spam filters 🙃
To use the new spam filter options, go to Spam filter menu.
Filter by countries
If you run a local business and expect submissions only from a certain country, you can filter out submissions from other countries.
Be cautious with the option "allow only the following countries" - some people or companies use VPN, which means that their connection may appear as if it's not from their actual country.
We recommend using the option to "filter out the following countries" if you consistently get spam messages from specific countries
Don't forget to enable the toggle
Filter by content
Sometimes specific spammers keep sending the same message over and over which can be really annoying.
To overcome this, you can use the content filter:
Let's say your contact form has name, email and message fields. You keep getting a submission that contains the text "grow up your money really fast" in the message field.
You can filter these messages out by adding a rule as can be seen below, and click the Add button.
Don't forget to enable the content filter toggle.
Note that you can add multiple rules.
Bypass spam validations
Wait, what? Why would I want that?
There could be couple of reasons to bypass spam validations.
- Testing - sometimes you want to test emails, webhooks, integrations, etc, and you just want the submission to go through, even if some spam validation fails
- There are cases that you create a form-submission from a server rather than from the website. I'll describe these more in another post. For now I'll just say that you may want the submission to "just work" because your server handled any validation.
To make a submission skip spam validations, enable the toggle and select a secret. The secret can be anything that you want.
When you send a submission with a field called _bypass and the value that matches your selected secret, spam validation will be skipped, and the submission will arrive into your inbox
Never expose the secret in your website, not even as a hidden field, because it will allow spammers to create submissions that will appear as valid.
