Form email field to exclude personal domains

Hi Ian - @hackalogy

Marissa here from the ActiveCampaign Customer Experience team. At this time our forms do not have a way to limit certain email addresses that try to sign up.

I would either suggest using a different form provider that does have this restriction, and use their integration with us to send the contacts to ActiveCampaign.

Another suggestion would be to use an if/else condition in an automation to check once the contact is added if they have an email address that contains (ex. Gmail.com, or yahoo.com), and then if “yes” you can use the step “unsubscribe from all lists”.

Please let me know if there is anything else I can assist you with at this time.

Re-posting my response on FB for people who don’t lurk there…

For a very cost effective service that won’t involve recreating forms, take at look at this from CleanTalk. https://cleantalk.org/help/i-want-to-block-ip. No affiliation. Cheers.

Thanks. No wonder I can’t find anything regarding this feature.
Anyway, the automation could be a good help.

I’m hesitant to use other software because well, if we have 100 forms, it would take 100 replacements for all the forms to complete. The automation however, that should be simple enough although a little bit time consuming.

Thanks again.

Hey Marissa, I tried the if/else condition.
It was working but I’m only allowed to enter 3 conditions in one segment. In order to add more, I’d have to create another segment. Blocking gmail, yahoo and maybe AOL or icloud would suffice.

Would it be possible to use multiple conditions? or maybe a simple hidden field that checks the email field? Is that even possible?

I just remembered something. When we registered for the activecampaign university, we’re not allowed to use the gmail. We’re only allowed to use our work email. RIght?

How come this isn’t a feature in Activecampaign forms?

Hi Ian @hackalogy

You are correct that for that specific condition we can only have up to 3. You can add a 2nd if/else condition in the automation, and it would look something like this: Marissa Kay 4 Email Marketi...

I do not see how the hidden field option would work because we still need the automation logic to determine which path they should go down.

Please let me know if you need any additional help with this.

Hi Ian @hackalogy,

When you registered we most likely used a different form platform for registration, and integrated it with our ActiveCampaign account (which is what a lot of customers do)

We can’t limit those email addresses from entering our forms as we also service B2C customers, and they do not want to block those email addresses. I hope that makes sense.

Please let me know if you have any other questions regarding this topic.

Makes sense. This would suffice. Thanks.

I’m just trying to find another way… What I meant by the hidden field option is to use a hidden field in order to determine if someone is using a personal email, it’d be filled out, if not, then it’s blank. Then the automation will check if the hidden field is empty or not. Kinda like the Honey pot but for the email domains.

I agree and love using the B2C factor of activecampaign. I’ve seen the power of activecampaign automation. It’s fantastic.

But in the case with B2B and B2C, I think it would be a nice feature to have where you can just turn it on or off.

Another idea I’m thinking of is using the exclusion list.
I could add the Gmail domain in the exclusion list. Turn on double opt-in. So if they use gmail, they won’t receive the double opt-in because it’s on the exclusion lists?

Will that work? What do you think?

Hey @hackalogy. You don’t need to worry about double opt-in. If the domain is on an exclusion list, when they select the submit button, they’ll see the following error. “This e-mail address has previously been removed for flagging a message as spam/abuse. If you believe this to be in error, please contact the account owner.” HTHs. Cheers.

Thanks @Shane . However, when I tried the exclusion it didn’t block the email address.

What I did was I used the option “ends with” and keyword “gmail.com” as the exclusion.

Or was I doing it wrong?

That’s how to do it. Silly question but I need to ask, you didn’t include the quotes did you? Did you choose all lists? If you didn’t and did, I don’t know why it wouldn’t be working for you. How long have you had your AC account?

I’ve tested my exclusion in both the @gmail.com and gmail.com format on two different account and it shows that error message. If you want to see it working, https://sbdemo1.activehosted.com/f/1
It might just be your turn to have problems.

Gotcha. I found the problem. Your sample form helped a lot when I found that it was the first form you created.
I tried doing it again.

Exclusions, included gmail . com as the “ends with”.
However, this time, I created a new form. Tested it out, and voila. It showed exactly what you showed me.

I tested my previous forms, and toink. The form submitted.

After a few trials and errors, I found out that our current forms (29 out of 31) does not add the contact into a list. Wherein, in the newly created form, I was prompted to select a list before the form was created.

So the exclusion will work if the form action is to subscribe them to the list. I would need to check if this works when they are added via automation and not form action (adding a tag to a contact doesn’t block them from submitting).
Otherwise, I would need to setup a staging list where I collect the leads (in order for exclusions to work) and clean up the list every week.

Again, thanks so much for pointing this out @Shane your input really helped me save my hair from being pulled out.

Well done. Great work in finding a solution. Where I went wrong was believing the error message. I wanted to see it ‘fail’ myself and yes, if the form doesn’t subscribe them to list, the error message is displayed to tell them they’re blocked BUT it does add them to the default list. Did you have a ticket number for this? If so, would you mind DMing it to me? If not, I can let AC know about this behaviour. Cheers.