Email Opt-In Spam Questions

Where have you been promoting your opt-in page?

I know that when I bought adfly traffic I got a whole load of very low quality subscribers where the gmail accounts were random character strings.

Also worth looking at the traffic stats and speaking with your host to block any suspicious IP address?

Lastly the real answer may lie at a more black hat forum than this one.

Why don't you go for single opt in? Chances are many people don't want to sign to a list.

Use a double opt-in and a captcha on your opt-in form this should stop it completely
edit: should have mentioned that will likely affect your opt-in rate

Lol. Talk about a mad spamming scientist eh.

This is something I've never seen before, one question.

How prominently placed is your squeeze page?

I have like 100's of squeeze pages out there, and have never encountered this.

(Though, I have encountered fake subscriptions from a bad solo ad or two lol).

Taking steps to stop this will also cause a decline in your legitimate opt in rate. Sometimes it is just easier to hit the delete button.

When I first started creating my first list, I had followed some , NOT so good advice and ended up with low quality traffic, Adfly being one of them. This is the only time I had seen these sort of signups like there was some sort of pattern using the same free email provider. Although once I quit using those services, it eventually stopped.

1. Try Captcha, that's easiest.

2. Also ask Aweber, unless you can access this in your dashboard, for the IP addresses for each subscriber. Aweber stores this data, I have asked them before in regards to an API build I was doing. Then you can see if its multiple subscribers are coming from one IP. They may not let you see it though. If they don't and you can figure out how to do it, you can start collecting IPs on your own to see for yourself. Then you can have Aweber IP ban those people for you possibly.

3. Another thing you can do to stop someone from doing this is change the code on your page. If someone built an automated bot, they are probably trying to post directly to your form (which Aweber can only protect against large volumes of this kind of abuse, not a few email addresses per day, more like 100+). I don't have Aweber but generally, similar services let you 'create' a form then give you code. You need to make a brand new form and delete the old one. Why?

Your aweber code will 'probably' change. So before in your code where it has <form> and will submit to a url like: http://aweber.com/userid=45345&formid=343

So when you delete the old form and make a new one, they won't be able to submit to the old form and will need to submit to the new one which will now be at: http://aweber.com/userid=45345&formid=34454

So people who program these auto post software just go down a list making site after site work with whatever they are doing. If yours breaks, they probably won't come back to yours in the near future at least.