Just curious has anyone ever turned signups around and asked for the person to send an email instead? Something like send an email to signup@someservice.com Then send a follow up confirmation email, no captcha required.
It depends really on how valuable your service is and how easy you can make it for them to send you an email , for example auto filling subject and body using the mailto query parameters , so that they just need to click the send button on their email app helps a lot.
It does reduce spam on contact forms , that’s for sure, but I don’t yet have enough data to say whether it hampers signups in a bad way.
My clients are pretty happy with this method tho , as it works fine for their domain and who they target on their landing pages.
Personally I kinda like this method of signup , at the same time I find it annoying for when I’m not signed into the email I want to use on the particular device I’m using , while I could still send the email from another device , it does remove the ease of having it auto filled for me.
But everything has pros and cons, And I kinda like the new upside down way at-least when I build them for the services I work on.
Also it has a few issues : While I’ve practically never faced this issue in real life yet , but I can think of someone trying it.
Is if they fake the MAILFROM header , I’ve got a few emails personally where they faked the mailfrom and mailto headers , unless you verify them with dkim they can still spam you , but it’s very rare and I haven’t seen any abuse of this method as of yet , however if more people start using it , I can see it happen.