Chat Widget now includes built-in spam protection to help prevent bot and high-volume suspicious submissions from impacting your messaging costs and sender reputation.

Spam protection works automatically in the background without adding CAPTCHA, extra form fields, or additional steps for genuine visitors.

Instead of deleting suspicious submissions, EveryCatch keeps the contact, tags it for review, and can pause SMS, email, or both based on your selected setting. This ensures potentially legitimate leads are not lost while preventing unnecessary outbound messages to suspicious contacts.

What changed

Automatic spam protection without visitor friction

Spam and suspicious submissions are detected automatically without changing the visitor experience.

There is

No CAPTCHA

No additional form fields

No extra loading or verification step

No change to the experience for genuine visitors

Suspicious leads are kept for review

Flagged contacts are not deleted.

They are created normally and tagged with

chat_widget_high_volume_flag

Depending on your configuration, SMS, email, or both can be paused for that contact. This allows your team to review suspicious leads and restore messaging when the submission is legitimate.

Protect your sender reputation

Sending messages to invalid phone numbers and email addresses can generate unnecessary costs, bounces, and delivery issues.

Spam Protection prevents outbound messaging on the selected channels for flagged contacts, helping reduce unnecessary messaging spend and protect SMS and email sender reputation.

Configure protection independently for each widget

Spam Protection is configured at the individual Chat Widget level.

You can choose from four actions

Tag Only

Pause SMS

Pause Email

Pause Both

Only the selected channel is affected. Other communication channels and existing DND preferences remain unchanged.

Clear activity history

When messaging is paused by Spam Protection, the contact activity log records the action and identifies the affected channel.

Flagged contacts can also be found by filtering for the chat_widget_high_volume_flag

Safe defaults for existing and new widgets

For existing Chat Widgets, Spam Protection is OFF by default so current behavior does not change unexpectedly.

For newly created Chat Widgets, Spam Protection is ON by default with Pause Both selected.

How to Enable Spam Protection

Go to Sites > Chat Widget.
Open the Chat Widget you want to configure.
Open Spam Protection in the builder sidebar.
Turn Spam Protection on.
Select the action to take when a suspicious submission is detected.
Save your changes.

To review flagged contacts later, filter your contacts using the chat_widget_high_volume_flag

If you're expecting an unusually large legitimate traffic spike, such as during a major campaign, launch, event, or press announcement, you can temporarily disable Spam Protection for that widget and enable it again afterward.

Why we built this

A spam attack against a Chat Widget can create hundreds of fake contacts within a short period of time. If automated follow-ups are triggered for those contacts, businesses can end up sending SMS and emails to invalid destinations.

Beyond the unnecessary messaging cost, repeated failures and bounces can negatively affect sender reputation and the deliverability of legitimate campaigns.

Chat Widget Spam Protection helps prevent this automatically while keeping suspicious contacts available for review rather than permanently discarding them.

For security reasons, the specific signals and thresholds used to identify suspicious activity are not published. This helps prevent malicious actors from designing submissions specifically to bypass the protection.