GDPR and contact form spam filtering: what you are allowed to do
Filtering contact form spam means reading personal data. What GDPR asks of you: a lawful basis, short retention, a line in your privacy notice, and care with providers and AI models.
What a filter can and cannot know about a message it has never seen, what it gets wrong, and how to measure that before you trust it with real enquiries.
Filtering contact form spam means reading personal data. What GDPR asks of you: a lawful basis, short retention, a line in your privacy notice, and care with providers and AI models.
A spam filter can be 99% accurate and still hold one real enquiry in ten. How to work out what those misses cost you, and how to measure a filter before you trust it.
Every other mailbox can learn who to trust. A contact form cannot, because a stranger writing to you for the first time is the whole point. What sender checks miss, and what still helps.
Change one setting in your contact form. Spam stops arriving, and real enquiries go to whoever should answer them. Try it for a week with nothing switched on.
We would like to count visits with Google Analytics, which sets two cookies. Decline and nothing is loaded and nothing is sent. What these are.