Newsletter subscriptions

[selwynorren]

Hi All,\\Does anyone have some advice on how to minimise the amount of spam newletter subscriptions? I have activated that each subscriber must activate the subscription, however some spammers seem to get around this. There is no recaptcha capability for it and so I see thousands of signups over a 30 day period.

Gratefully only the subscribers that have confirmed their subscriptions are active, however it also still means thousands of emails go out and then get listed as spam. This is frustrating.

I would really appreciate some advise here

[e-com]

Are you using the original native blocknewsletter module from thirtybees?
Because in this module, if a subscription is not confirmed with a link from an email (containing a token), such an email is not added to subscriber database, even as inactive.

[datakick]

That functionality is indeed useful. But confirmation email is always sent, and the recipient is likely to move it to spam folder (because they didn't requested it in the first place). This will effectively degrade your send mail reputation.

I believe what @selwynorren wants is some sort of bot preventions. 

[selwynorren]

Hey Datakick,

Yeah a bot prevention would be so much better as you say the confirmation email is always sent and if they report this as spam and it happens often enough, then domain can get banned or have limitations placed on it. This for being innocent and not sending spam - lol.

I see there is a badbot module available in the marketplace, would this be helpful?

[datakick]

1 minute ago, selwynorren said:

I see there is a badbot module available in the marketplace, would this be helpful?

Blackhole for Bad Bots module is designed for crawlers that do not follow robots.txt instructions, and instead visit every url they find. It may, or may not, help you. Depending on how that particular bot is made. Note that it only blocks IP address, so if the bot is changing IP addresses, it will not help as well.

[selwynorren]

Hey Datakick, thanks so much

Just a quick other question related to newsletter signups. The system works, however I noticed it does not generate a voucher code in the cart rules at all, Is this how its supposed to work? Do I have to manually specify the cart rule before hand? however would I then know how many to make available as I wont be able to predict how many signups I would get? or can this limit be set to infinite numbers? How would I be able to restrict it to a specific user, otherwise it could be used over and over again by the same customer

[datakick]

2 minutes ago, selwynorren said:

Hey Datakick, thanks so much

Just a quick other question related to newsletter signups. The system works, however I noticed it does not generate a voucher code in the cart rules at all, Is this how its supposed to work? Do I have to manually specify the cart rule before hand? however would I then know how many to make available as I wont be able to predict how many signups I would get? or can this limit be set to infinite numbers? How would I be able to restrict it to a specific user, otherwise it could be used over and over again by the same customer

Yes, it is designed that way.

You can limit the cart rule to be used only once (Total available for each user). 

Of course, this is problematic if you allow 'Guest checkout' functionality, because then they can indeed reuse the same voucher over and over again - each guest is considered different user)

To mitigate this, you can limit the cart rule only to Customers group -- they can use it, as long as they register as a customer instead of guest.

 

[selwynorren]

This is awesome, so for total number of uses I should just set it to a crazy high number for now? is there not an option where we can set it to 0 for example which means there wont be a limit at all (Or even -1 which could translate to no limit)

 

Even the date validity, how would one set that to ensure it remain valid no matter when they sign up

 

P.S Thanks so much for the quick feedback

Edited February 17, 2023 by selwynorren

[e-com]

1 hour ago, datakick said:

That functionality is indeed useful. But confirmation email is always sent, and the recipient is likely to move it to spam folder (because they didn't requested it in the first place). This will effectively degrade your send mail reputation.

I believe what @selwynorren wants is some sort of bot preventions. 

Rather, these malicious bots do not use real existing email accounts. They just generate random strings like qy63wxv58yz@gmail.com, just like malicious bot for prestashop 1.7 that massively creates fake customer accounts does.
However, actually, if google gets a million 🙂 fake emails from our store, it might add our domain or our server's IP to the blacklist.