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Knowledgebase: SPAM / Anti-virus
How do I cut down on the number of spam messages I get?
Posted by James Robshaw on 04 May 2006 10:13 PM

Techniques to stop spam fall into two categories: Filtering out spam and minimising the exposure of your email addresses.

  • Do Not, ever, click on the REMOVE link SPAMmers add to their emails to you. This also will verify your email address as VALID and your address will be added to the list and sold to more Spammers
  • Some spam emailers use computer programs to guess at email addresses. So use unusual email addresses containing numbers and letters e.g. fred245pride@example.com
  • If you want to enable users of your website to contact you online, provide a form. But make sure the "send to" email address is not contained in the page HTML, but in the form processing script.
  • Spammers use special programs that extract email addresses from Web sites and Usenet postings. To avoid ending on a spammer's mailing list when you post to a Web forum or a newsgroup, you can obscure your email address by inserting something obvious into it. If your email address is fred@example.com,  modify it to read fred@your[delete_this]example.com.  
  • Never reply to spam messages, even when they entice you to reply to "remove" you from their mailing lists. Often the instructions are either bogus, or a way to collect more addresses. Replying confirms to the spammers that your email address is active, and you may receive even more junk mail.
  • Remove your email address from your website's pages and provide a web based mail form instead. This way spammers can't send robots to your page to harvest email addresses and put them on their mailing lists.
  • Removing your email adresses is not always practical on business websites. Therefore, Encode your email address on html pages. So instead of fred@example.com insert "domain.com" instead. It will render the same on the html page, but makes it far harder to be harvested by spammers. (ProExe provides this encoding service)

For realtime spam and anti-virus filtration use ProExe's TrustedMail.

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