Opt-in forms is an essential tool for building your mailing list and successful email marketing. However, they are frequently exploited by bots and malicious actors, leading to various problems.

In this article we cover the following points:

• Automated bot signups, fake, malicious signups and form spamming.
• Understanding the risks.
• How and why it happens.
• Why you need to protect your opt-in forms.
• Available protection methods in nuevoMailer.
• Best practices: Double opt-in & more.
• Monitoring and automation.

Keywords: opt-in form protection, email deliverability, sender reputation, domain reputation, form spamming, double opt-in, Captcha methods, data protection, monitoring, list cleaning.

You can read the full article here.

Step 1

Create a newsletter with the URL(s) you want to track.

Step 2

Create a campaign that uses the newsletter from Step 1 and a mailing list that includes only your own email as a subscriber.

You can give a name to this campaign like "Signature tracker X".

Step 3

Send this campaign. When you receive the newsletter copy the trackable links and you can use them anywhere you like. Email signatures, banners etc.

Anonymous tracking

You may use "Anonymous tracking" for this campaign. If you do so the only metric you will be able to see is "All clicks". Just the total number without any other details.

if you do not use Anonymous tracking then when you click the "All clicks" metric you will see a detailed click history with date, time and IP and a timeline report. In addition, the clicks will show in your Home page report "Happening now".

Of course the "clicker" will always be your own email.

A step further: friendly URL with .htaccess

This is optional. You can add these two lines in your htaccess file of your domain.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^sig$ https://www.domain.tld/mailer/inc/rdr.php?xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [R=301,L]

https://www.domain.tld/mailer/inc/rdr.php?xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx is the actual tracking link you can use as explained earlier in Step 3. Instead you can use https://www.domain.tld/sig and it will have the same effect. You may replace sig with whatever you prefer.

[R=301,L] may be omitted. 301 means permanent redirect, [L] stands for "last" and means that this is the last rule to be processed.