Preventing Spam
According to a research study conducted by the Center for Democracy & Technology, the vast majority of spam is sent to addresses that are found on web pages. Typically these email addresses are found by automated programs called “bots” that scan the web much like search engines do. The obvious solution is not to post any addresses on your website, but you probably would prefer not to make it more difficult on your customers. One option is to display the email address as a graphic since it’s difficult to convert this into text. However, this makes it more difficult for site visitors to easily and reliably use it. If you make the image a link that start an email, you may risk including the email address in the HTML source, so you’ll still have the same problem. Another alternative, and that I generally recommend, is to encode your email address so that it appears normally to users but is difficult for most web-bots to read.
Another preventative measure is to choose a non-obvious naming scheme since spammers also find addresses simply by guessing commonly used terms and names. For instance, info@example.com and john@example.com are easy to guess and will almost certainly attract spam. You might use first name and last initial or first initial and last name to complicate things a little.
What do you do if you’re already receiving a lot of spam? While most reputable companies will respond to unsubscribe requests, most spam is from less reputable sources that ignore such requests or interpret them as confirmation that the address reaches a real person. The best–and really only–solution is to use a spam filter: software that automatically distinguishes between “real” mail and spam. There are many good anti-spam products on the market. You may already have free access to antispam tools through your Internet Service Provider (ISP) or web hosting company, or your antivirus / security suite may include them. (If you aren’t using a security suite, get one.)
For more information on spam prevention, consider joining the Windows Secrets Newsletter to receive your complimentary copy of Brian Livingston’s Spam-Proof Your E-Mail Address.
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