Minimize Spam
As we are all aware, spam is quickly becoming a crisis, if it is not already. It is currently estimated that spam accounts for more than 90% of all e-mail sent over the Internet. Given that e-mail is the most widely used technology on the Internet, this impacts the productivity of almost everyone who uses e-mail. So, what do you? This article will attempt to outline some of the reasons that you might receive so much spam and ways to mitigate the flow of spam into your inbox.
E-mail Address Formatting. Unfortunately, many of us set up our e-mail address years ago before spam was an issue. As such, many of us used simple e-mail names like our first name @ our domain name: john@mydomain.com. These types of e-mail addresses are easy for spammers to guess and as such, increases your chance of receiving spam.
When creating an e-mail address, we suggest you use a combination of names, initials and special characters. For example, if your name is Jane Elizabeth Smith, use an address like j.e.smith@domain.com or je_smith@domain.com. The best e-mail address would be random combinations of letters or numbers: j4n3.5m1th@domain.com. Of course, this is not practical as it is a difficult address to remember.
Never Use A Catchall. A catchall is a technology from a “kinder, gentler Internet”. When an e-mail address is set up as a catchall, it will receive mail for any name at that domain. So, if you have john@domainname.com set up as a catchall, and a spammer sends e-mails to barry@domainname.com, peterparker@domainname.com, and lamp@domainname.com, you will receive all of those spam messages even though the addresses do not exist.
Multi-Level Spam Filtering. These days, almost every hosting provider offers spam filtering. Furthermore, many e-mail clients (Thunderbird, Entourage, Outlook etc) offer spam filtering built in to the program. Use both.
The spam filters in many of the e-mail clients are learning filters. This means that you can train them and that makes them a very powerful tool in fighting spam. In Thunderbird, for example, if a message comes in that is spam but was not identified as spam, you can click a button and tell Thunderbird that it is spam. Thunderbird will learn from that and update the filters to include particular characteristics in subsequent filtering.
To decrease false positives (legitimate mail filtered as spam), you can keep the spam filter settings on the server at a neutral or permissive level and use the learning filter of your e-mail client.
You can also use 3rd party filters such as Norton or PCcillin, adding a 3rd level of filtering.
Do Not Post Your Address In Plain Text. If you have a website, you may want your visitors to be able to contact you. In the past, many webmasters would post an e-mail address on the site in plain text or use an html function called “Mailto:”. These techniques, while they make it easy for potential clients to contact you, also make it easy for spammers to find you because spammers have spiders or “bots” that crawl the web looking for websites using these techniques.
Some alternatives include:
- Use a mail script that does not post an address for public consumption. You can also use Captcha on a mail script. This requires the user to enter letters or numbers from an image before submitting the form. This will mitigate spam bots from exploiting your mail script.
- Post the e-mail address as an image instead of plain text/html. This technique is quickly becoming obsolete as spam bots can now harvest information from images.
- Use technologies that ban spam bots from accessing your contact page. Currently, we know of only one script that does this and we have not fully tested it ourselves. It is called Bad Behavior and it requires that your pages use PHP.
- If you must post your e-mail address on your website, you can format it so it is harder for spam bots to recognize. For example, contact(at)domain(dot)com.
Bcc Over CC. When you need to send e-mail to numerous recipients, always use the Bcc option versus the Cc option. The Cc function posts every recipients address for every other recipient to see. Bcc hides all of the recipient addresses. This is important because so many computers on the Internet have been compromised. When a compromised computer receives an e-mail with Cc’d recipients, the hacker now has a host of new addresses to add to a spam list. While your participation in Bcc’ing versus Cc’ing does not stop the flow of spam to you, it is a courteous and responsible action as a member to the World Wide Web.
Use Auto Responders With Caution. Auto Responders are a technology that automatically sends a response e-mail to anyone who e-mails you. While these can be a powerful tool for your business, they also alert spammers that they have found a live e-mail address and they will continue to send spam to that address.
Form Submissions. Be careful of what forms you submit your e-mail address to. If you regularly shop online or, if a website requires an e-mail address to sign up for something, you may consider setting up a residential class e-mail account like Hotmail, Yahoo, or Gmail to use for these purposes. This way, you are not increasing the risk of your business or organizational e-mail address being shared with other spam lists.
