Any public form attracts junk. Enquiries that look like spam are marked as possible spam and kept out of the working queue, where they would otherwise train your team to skim.

Checking what was caught

Turn on show spam to see what has been held back. Do this occasionally — not daily, but often enough to know a real customer has not been sitting in there for a fortnight.

Blocking senders

A persistent nuisance can be blocked by email address, or by whole domain where the same outfit keeps changing the local part. Blocking by domain is powerful and worth a second thought — a whole company's worth of potential customers sits behind some domains.

Reducing spam at source

• Ask for one field a robot finds awkward — a list choice rather than only free text.
• Do not publish the raw form address anywhere a scraper will find it.
• If one form attracts everything, look at where it is linked from.