Responsible Contact Form Outreach with CanForm
CanForm is built to make B2B contact form outreach more efficient — it is not designed for indiscriminate mass sending or spam. This page explains the principles behind responsible use of CanForm and the safeguards it provides. Read through this before running your first real campaign.
Basic principles
- CanForm is a productivity tool for B2B outreach, not a spam tool.
- Selecting outreach targets, message content, and compliance with applicable laws and industry norms in your jurisdiction are your own responsibility.
- CanForm does not determine or guarantee legal compliance on your behalf.
Exclude sites that opt out of sales contact
If a site explicitly states it doesn’t want sales calls or emails, exclude it from your outreach targets. This is both good etiquette and a practical way to avoid unnecessary friction.
CanForm includes opt-out detection, which can check for this before sending using two independent methods (each toggle is optional; both default to off).
- Rule-based detection — matches against a predefined list of phrases indicating the site doesn’t want sales inquiries. No API call required, instant.
- AI-based detection — passes the page’s text to AI to judge, from context, whether it prohibits sales inquiries or states that contacting them incurs a fee. More robust to varied phrasing, but incurs API cost.
When detected, CanForm skips the company without consuming your free-tier run count.
Don’t submit when CAPTCHA is detected
When CanForm detects reCAPTCHA or hCaptcha, it does not attempt to bypass it — it skips submission for that company and logs the result. A CAPTCHA is often a signal that the site doesn’t want automated submissions, so CanForm is designed to respect that rather than work around it.
Confirm with a dry run before sending
We recommend confirming your content with a dry run (a mode that fills the form without submitting) before any real send. Whenever you’re starting out, or after changing your list or message template, run a dry run first to confirm everything looks right. See Getting started with CanForm for how to run one.
Control your volume and pacing
Avoid high-volume, rapid submissions in a short period. CanForm supports the following controls.
- Rate control — a randomized wait interval (min/max) between companies.
- A cap on companies per run — limit how many companies are processed in a single run.
- Duplicate-submission prevention — companies already submitted to are automatically skipped on subsequent runs.
Care when building your list
Avoid including inappropriate targets from the list-building stage itself.
- Government agencies and municipalities are outside the scope of B2B sales outreach.
- Don’t include companies or URLs you can’t verify are real (don’t rely solely on guesses or aggregator sites).
- Avoid duplicate entries.
See How to build a CSV outreach list for more detail.
You are responsible for confirming applicable law and terms of use
The laws and each site’s terms of use that apply to contact form outreach vary by country, region, industry, and message content. In many jurisdictions, anti-spam and electronic communications regulations may apply. CanForm does not guarantee compliance with these — the final decision of whether to send, and to whom, is yours.
We recommend including your company name, a real contact method, and an opt-out path for future contact in every message you send. Being considerate of the recipient’s perspective tends to build trust over time.