How a sign-up form fills your list

Transcript

Stay chill. A sign-up form on your website adds people to your list. Here's how bots are kept out, and how each address is checked before it's mailed.

Here's the path a sign-up takes. Someone signs up on your website. Bots are kept out. A real person joins the form's list. And their address is checked before it's ever mailed.

Every sign-up is sorted before it's saved. A bot that fills in a hidden field, or submits faster than any person could, is quietly dropped. A known throwaway address is refused. So is a sign-up from a website you didn't allow. And so are too many from one visitor. A real person joins your list.

Here's a sign-up form, under Forms, with the list it fills.

Its settings show the list every sign-up joins. With double opt-in on, each person is emailed a link first, and joins only when they click it.

And here's its spam protection: the websites allowed to use the form, the fastest a person can submit, and how many sign-ups each visitor can make.

Every new address is then checked, like any list you upload. If it's been checked before, that answer is reused. If not, its own mail server is asked, and where it can't say, a probe confirms it first. There are films on cleaning and probing.

That's sign-up forms: real people in, bots kept out, and every address checked first. Next up: see what happens when someone fills in your landing page's form. Don't freeze up!