If you have any kind of an online presence, you most likely get spam email. Spending any more time on it than you have to wastes precious time and money. Spam is frustrating and costly in and of itself, but rather than spend any time chasing down spammers or turning them in, minimize your frustration and wasted time by reducing incoming spam and installing a good spam filter to deal with what does get through.
Here are three tips for efficiently and effectively dealing with spam.
- Make sure you do not have a “catch-all” email account on your email server. A catch-all address is one that receives all email sent to your domain whether or not it’s addressed to a set mailbox.
- Don’t publish your email address on your website (or anyone else’s), either in text form or in the HTML. Of course, if you’re in business, you need to make yourself available to you customers, but there are many ways to make your email address available to humans and not spambots. To hide your email address from the spambots you can display it as an image rather than text or disguise it with JavaScript. Alternatively, use a contact form instead of providing an email address. (Be sure the contact form you use doesn’t include your email address in the HTML.) You can use a free form generator like Master Feedback or for more complex needs and more protection, we recommend MasterForm V4.
- Use a good spam filter for your incoming email. We use and recommend MailWasherPro because it works while still giving me complete control over my email.
As long as it’s inexpensive and effective, spammers will continue to spam. Don’t give them any more time than you have to.
For more tips on preventing spam and to learn more about protecting your website from other vulnerabilities, read my interview Will Bontrager, an expert CGI programmer and author of some of my favorite scripts.
4 responses so far ↓
Azlan Hussain @ Online business ideas & opportunities // Apr 21, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Well sometimes even if we do take precautions actions they seams know how to get it from other sources. One area that I know of is via spyware. Even if you can restly assure that your PC is safe but you can’t control your friends PC right.. so when you send email to them your email address is easily taken if they do not protect their PC properly..
cheers,
WAHM Tara // Apr 21, 2008 at 8:54 pm
Spam has really got out of control. I have used every software I could get and every blocker possible and still get bombarded with 100’s of spam emails every day.
Sunny // Apr 22, 2008 at 5:04 pm
The CATCHALL email address tip is the best. I didn’t understand that for about 6 months. It turned out that 95% of my spam mail was coming from addresses I didn’t even recognize. Another BIG one, for me at least, was the “return to sender” email bounce backs. The really frustrating thing is that I wasn’t the sender on these. People just hyjack your address and make you the FROM… Something needs to be done to move email technology forward. I know in the corporate world, they are starting to get into TLS and certificates, but it’s REALLY slow. I, for one, can’t wait for this to be cleaned up.
Linda Stacy // Apr 22, 2008 at 5:41 pm
Thanks for all your comments.
Azlan, that’s an excellent point. We all need to secure our systems not only for our own protection, but to safeguard others’ information as well.
Tara, if spam is completely overwhelming you may have to change your email addresses. But make sure you have a system in place first. Don’t post the new ones on any sites and use a Baysian spam filter (and you’ve got to stick with it for a while to “train” it). More info about the different types of filters can be found at http://www.spamstopping.com/filter-spam
Sunny, those “bounced” messages email are the most frustrating to me too. Thankfully the ones I’ve received lately are single mailings to me only, not the ones where someone highjacked my email address to send out hundreds of messages. (Knock on wood!)
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