Stop Spam Email

The only sure way to avoid receiving spam is to make sure your email address is never published or listed anywhere on the Internet. Not a realistic choice for most of us who have any kind of online presence and just about impossible if you do business online.

There are steps you can take to minimize your exposure and keep your inbox relatively spam free.

The number one most effective technique you can use to keep spam email out of your business inbox is to keep your email address off of your website. However, here at Spam Stopping, we believe that to succeed in business online you must promote a feeling of trust and to do that, you must provide a variety of ways for your customer to contact you, including via email.

Here are several methods you can use to provide email access to your customers while keeping your email address off of the spam email lists.

1 - One of the easiest methods is to use an email obsfucator. An email obsfucator is simply a little script that disguises your email address so that the spambots can’t harvest it, but your customers can still click a link to email you. The easiest one I’ve found is Master Spambot Buster.

Most email obsfucators are javascripts so there will still be a small number of customers who can’t reach you that way so we recommend also including a contact form on your website.

2 -There are other methods of hiding your email address from the spambots, but we’re not confident that these methods will work. We fear that the more sophisticated spambots can circumvent these methods. However others still heartily recommend these methods so we present them here for you to determine their effectiveness.

One method is to display your email address in a manner that site visitors can “decode” but shouldn’t be easily harvested by the spambots. In particular you should leave out the @ symbol or include additional text. For example, “me at mydomain.com” or “me-removethistext@mydomain.com” Keep in mind that using this method may discourage customers from contacting you because they won’t take the time to make the adjustments.

Another suggested method allows for a clickable link by using character codes in your html for the entire email address. The harvesting tools can’t read it, but your customers can still email you.

Encode your email address for free at: http://www.wbwip.com/wbw/emailencoder.html

3 - Use a contact form on your website and be sure the form does not require that your email address be present in the HTML code on your page.

Your webhosting likely provides a formmail script. Some scripts do not include your email address in the form HTML code, but one of most common free scripts does contain your email address which will leave you vulnerable to the spambots and fill your inbox with spam.

When you choose a contact form script you also need to make sure it’s secure against abuse. Some contact form scripts are vulnerable to spammer using the form to send spam through your server.

SpamStopping.com recommends MasterForm V4 which includes built-in spam reduction tools.

4 - Don’t use your business email address for any other online activities such as discussion groups and chat rooms. If you are participating in networking groups you’ll want people to be able to contact you so use the throw away email address method described in the personal email section above.

5 - Make sure your business email address is not filtered by your server and use a personal email filter that lets you review all email before it’s discarded. You want to be absolutely sure that you receive all your legitimate business email.

Spam Stopping recommends MailWasherPro.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 23rd, 2006 at 4:40 pm and is filed under Tips & Techniques. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.