REVIEW: Ultimate Form Mail (UFMail) - The Ultimate Webform Spam Protection
Posted by Derrick on 1st August 2007
Let me start by giving you some background on what lead to this discovery. We manage 100’s of websites for the construction contractor industry. Just about every website has at least one webform for contacting the company. Over the years, hackers and spammers have found ways to send spam through them to our customers through their websites. One particularly enterprising hacker found a way to actually use one of our customer’s forms as a mail server to send spam out to anyone they wanted. Our security systems quickly put a clamp on the breach of security, but it made us take a really close look at permanently locking down our webforms so we could sleep soundly at night.
We almost went with a Captcha implementation to protect all our customers’ webforms. However, we decided against it because they can actually deter people from using your lead generating web form.
After much research, we went with Ultimate Form Mail (UFMail). It has some amazing capabilities when it comes to transparently protecting your webforms from hackers. We also liked that it can also log all form submissions to a database if we needed.
You can learn more about Ultimate Form Mail here:
http://visionwebservices.com/recommends/ufmail
This PDF report has a gread deal of good info about protecting webforms from spammers:
http://visionwebservices.com/recomme…ail-report.pdf
We spent several hours doing research on form processors; way more time than we expected. There are so many options and it is very difficult to compare beyond actually installing and using each one. All of our R&D will pay off in the long run for our customers and us. When you manage as many sites as we do, it pays to have strong email and webform spam defenses. Many of our customers have mentioned getting less SPAM after we implemented the Ultimate Form Mail processor.
I guess the only complaint I have is how much time it took to implement. Now, allow me to clarify. All form processors take a decent amount of time to properly configure. I always had hopes of finding one that made it really easy. But alas, I think that is impossible if you want a secure form processor that gives you as many functions as UFMail. I had it up and running in basic mode within minutes of uploading it to my webserver. The real time is spent in modifying it to do exactly what I wanted it to do.
Advantages - UFMail form processor
- Powerful anti-hack and anti-spam built-in.
- Easy to configure by editing one text file.
- Built-in auto-responder email function. Instantly send a thank you to the person that submitted the form. This is good for leaving your contact info in their email.
- Can log all form submissions to a database (mySQL) on your host. Most hosting services include at least one database.
- Emails sent from form include basic html template so you can format it how you wish or just leave it alone.
- Cost is low for included security and overall functionality. $29
Disadvantages - UFMail form processor
- Setup still requires some basic html form creation knowledge. (If you hire a pro to install, this is not an issue.)
- A hosted service like www.response-o-matic.com may be easier for non-professionals. Hosted services typically offer a user-friendly wizard for designing your form and auto-responder text. However, you still need to edit a page on your website to include the code required to make the form work.
- Not free
We heartily recommend the Ultimate Form Mail processor for use on all websites as we have not run into one showstopper problem.
Feel free to contact me through our website if you need someone to install UFMail for you.
Posted in Spam & Security | No Comments »