How to Automatically Validate Email Addresses From Elementor/WordPress Contact Forms

Receiving email subscriptions and website form submissions from non-existent or fake email addresses can be frustrating and damaging to your business, website and email reputation. In this article, we will walk you through practical steps to automatically validate email addresses so as to detect and block spam email subscriptions or contact form submissions, saving you the headaches that come with spam WordPress or Elementor form submissions.

Our Story

When we started getting a flood of spam form submissions from our Elementor blog subscriptions and contact forms submissions on our WordPress website, we decided to start automatically validate email addresses. The spam submissions were not by bots (we know this because we had inserted the ‘Honeypot’ field on all our Elementor forms). They were being submitted by real people with plenty of time on their hands, with most of the submissions having fake email addresses on them. Having said that, some malicious bots have been known to have the ability to identify the honeypot requirements and bypass Elementor’s “Honeypot” field while sending spam form submissions.

The main problem we were concerned with was that these form submitters were receiving emails from us on form submission (to their fake or non-existent email addresses sent using Elementor’s “Send Email” action step), meaning our email reputation could be severely damaged if we did not put an end to it.

With our background in workflow automation, we decided to do just that.

The Trouble with Spam WordPress Form Submissions

Spam WordPress or Elementor form submissions can severely impact a business’s email reputation. These unsolicited entries often bypass security measures and flood inboxes with irrelevant, sometimes malicious content. As spam submissions increase, email servers may flag legitimate business communications as spam, leading to a poor sender reputation. This often results in important marketing emails or customer communications being undelivered or marked as junk. Over time, businesses face decreased email deliverability, reduced engagement and a damaged brand image. To prevent this, businesses should implement robust anti-spam measures like email validation to safeguard their email reputation.

How We Automatically Validate Email Addresses

We strategised our email validation workflow automation into three different stages:
1. First, we use Elementor’s “Webhook” action to send the form data to our first automated workflow.
2. The first automated workflow extracts the email address from the data it receives from the webhook and uses an email validation service to verify that the email address is valid and deliverable. If it is valid and deliverable, this automation then sends the form data to the next automated workflow.
3. Our final automated workflow sends an email to the validated email address, and finally adds their contact details to our database.

The reason we strategised having two different automated workflows was because the second automation service did not have the email validation app integrated into their platform, and so, we had to use a different platform for the automatic email validation step.

1. Using the Elementor “Webhook” Action to Send Form Data

First, we obtained our webhook URL from our first automated workflow on Pipedream. We then entered this URL in the “Webhook” action step on the Elementor form.