September 18, 2026 · New Feature Communication

Chat Widget Spam Protection Helps Control Messaging

Chat Widget spam protection flags suspicious submissions, keeps contacts for review, and can pause SMS, email, or both by widget.

SMBcrm Team · September 18, 2026

SMBcrm Chat Widget now includes built-in spam protection to help reduce bot and high-volume suspicious submissions without adding friction for genuine visitors.

Spam protection runs in the background. It does not add CAPTCHA, extra form fields, additional loading, or verification steps to the visitor experience.

What Changes

Suspicious Chat Widget submissions are not deleted. Contacts are still created and tagged for review with chat_widget_high_volume_flag.

Depending on the widget setting you choose, SMBcrm can pause:

SMS
Email
Both SMS and email
Neither channel, while only applying the review tag

This helps teams review potentially legitimate leads without automatically sending unnecessary outbound messages to suspicious contacts.

Why It Matters

Spam submissions can create fake contacts quickly. If automated follow-ups run for those contacts, businesses may send SMS or email to invalid destinations, creating unnecessary messaging costs, bounces, and deliverability issues.

Spam protection helps protect your communication workflows by pausing selected outbound channels for flagged contacts while keeping the contact available for review.

Spam protection is configured separately for each Chat Widget. Available actions are:

Tag Only
Pause SMS
Pause Email
Pause Both

Only the selected channel is affected. Other communication channels and existing Do Not Disturb preferences remain unchanged.

Activity and Review

When spam protection pauses messaging, the contact activity log records the action and identifies the affected channel.

To review flagged contacts, filter your contacts by the chat_widget_high_volume_flag tag. If a flagged submission is legitimate, your team can review it and restore messaging as needed.

Default Settings

Existing Chat Widgets have spam protection turned off by default so current behavior does not change unexpectedly.

Newly created Chat Widgets have spam protection turned 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.

If you expect 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.

Detection Details

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