In February, I discovered the contact form on my corporate website wasn’t working. I’m not exactly sure what happened, but my WordPress developer made a fix that solved the deliverability issue. However, the contact form receives a fair amount of spam emails now that it is working. This issue needs to be addressed at some point soon, but it is more of an annoyance than a problem.

My email provider has been doing a good job of marking these spam messages correctly. I check the spam folder on a regular basis to try to ensure I am not missing anything, but if a contact form email is marked as spam and isn’t quickly identifiable as something other than spam, I’ll just trash it and all other spam emails.

Yesterday, I took a quick look at the spam folder, and I saw a contact form submission that didn’t look like spam. I fished it out, marked it as legitimate, and I saw it was a message about a domain name I own. The prospective buyer saw a domain name I own listed for sale and wanted to ask a few questions and negotiate a slightly better deal. He indicated he was ready to pull the trigger if we could come to terms quickly, and we were able to do just that. The deal is north of $50k, so I’m glad I didn’t miss the email.

I am pretty vigilant about monitoring my various spam folders to be sure I don’t miss anything important. I have added quite a few filtered terms to catch more spam, and sometimes emails are misidentified by my email provider. I think this particular email was due to the spam filter being a bit overzealous due to the number of actual spam submissions that are sent through, but it was a good reminder to me to keep checking on a regular basis.