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Spam Fighting Tips For Website Owners
by Eric Lester
Website owners face a unique challenge. Making an email address public to communicate with your visitors also makes that address a magnet for spam. Learn how to minimize your risk and still provide that important email contact.
Having a host that provides exceptional Spam blocking services is a must these days. Webmasters and business owners can find their domain email particularly at risk to Spam as their email addresses may be freely available on their websites for both humans, and so-called "spambots" to find. By following a few simple guidelines, you can reduce the stress on your Spam filters by making your email a far harder target to hit. Note that most of these tips are "preventative" in nature. If you read one and know you've already exposed your email to that very threat, then you will either need to lose that address or make sure you have a really good filter.
Fooling the Sensors
As a webmaster or the owner of an online store, you want visitors to have
a simple avenue of contact. Placing your email address on your site provides
this simple avenue, but that avenue is wide, and more than just your customers
will journey down it. Having an email address properly formatted and linked
from your website makes it the perfect target for spambots. Much like search
engine bots that spider the web cataloging information, these bots harvest
email addresses for use in mass market email lists. Keeping your email visible
to humans but invisible to bots can be accomplished a variety of ways.
- Don't link your email with a "mailto:" hyperlink
- Spell out your address, for example "sales at yourdomain.com"
- Display your email graphically, but don't link the graphic
- Advanced users may consider displaying email using Macromedia Flash, as most bots can't understand links embedded within Flash. This preserves the ability for humans to quickly click your email address and send. This is not to suggest your entire site be in Flash, simply a single email "button."
Keeping the Secret
This may seem like common sense, but simply minimizing the exposure of your
email off your website, as well as on, will aide in stemming the tide of
Spam. Your professional email should be used as sparingly as possible. Don't
use it to sign up for personal newsletters or enter into contest forms on
other sites. No matter what assurances of privacy a site may provide, the
likelihood an address will be Spammed increases each time it's used. Keep
your professional and personal matters highly separated. If you want to
get a newsletter, even a professional one, use a home address or consider
the use of a free email account. There are a variety of services from large
Internet portals like Yahoo and Google. Not only are they free, but they
also provide built-in Spam filters, making their use far more preferable
for "high risk" situations.
Finally, though it should be completely obvious, don't respond to unsolicited mass email in any way. Don't click on their links, reply to the mail, or buy their products. It should be obvious, but the fact is, the reason we all continue to be deluged with unsolicited emails is actually quite simple. They are still profitable to the people sending them. Even if their response rate is in the tenths of a percent, they still make money and thus still send out more. The people who respond are the ones that ensure a Spam filled future for us all.
The Removal Scam
Spam arrives, but, not to fear, there's a helpful removal link at the bottom.
Click, submit, reply, whatever- they come in many flavors, and all of them
are potentially deadly. Though a natural response it to use these removal
tools, it's that natural response upon which Spammers prey. Following "removal"
instructions may do one of two things. It may remove you from the list,
or it may simply be the confirmation a mass emailer needs that the address
asking to be removed is, in fact, a real live email account. Instead of
stopping unwanted emails, the email account will only receive more, since
it has become more valuable than before. It's more valuable because there's
a confirmation someone is actively using it. Are all removal links scams?
No, they aren't. Some removal links are legitimate. Determining whether
a removal link is completely valid is difficult. Never click removal links
from unsolicited mass emails, they are most suspect.
Last Lines of Defense
The final lines of defense are filters. Keeping your professional email
as quiet as possible and safe from roaming spambots are the primary preventative
measures you can reasonably be expected to take. All that remains are
filters, on both a server and local level. For site owners, having a host
with strong anti-Spam and virus filters installed on your server is your
best line of defense. A wide variety of server side filters are available,
such as SpamAssassin and MailBoxCop. This kind of service
stops Spam and viruses from ever reaching your inbox. Ideally, like MailBoxCop,
the service will provide a web based interface to verify it's quarantined
emails and make sure nothing was "over filtered".
Less effective and generally redundant in face of server side filters, are filters built into email programs. These filters will generally be simple blacklists or filters built on regular expressions. Some may have may have more advanced Bayesian filers built in that can "learn" from being fed a selection of Spam email. It's preferable such a filter reside on the server and process a large amount of emails in order to be most effective. MailBoxCop functions beyond the server level, intercepting Spam and virus filters before they reach their intended destination's network.
Conclusions
Keeping your business email as confidential as possible is the best preventative
measure against Spam. If you need to have contact email on your site, ensure
that it is not directly linked or formatted in such a way as to make it
an easy target for spambots. The ideal solution is a simple button in Flash
that humans may use like any other button but that is unreadable from a
bot's perspective. Beyond confidentiality, ensure you have strong, robust
filters for your site's email addresses. This is the only option for an
address that's already been picked up by the mass emailers. It's difficult
to completely staunch the flow of Spam, but good filters can put a stop
to most of it.
About The Author
Mr. Lester has served for 4 years as the webmaster for ApolloHosting.com
and previously worked in the IT industry an additional 5 years, acquiring
knowledge of hosting, design, and search engine optimization. Apollo Hosting
provides website hosting, ecommerce
hosting, vps
hosting, and web design
services to a wide range of customers. Established in 1999, Apollo prides
itself on the highest levels of customer support. Click for more hosting
articles.
Note: These articles are provided for general interest and content purposes only, and should not be construed as "support" materials. Apollo Hosting does not guarantee the information contained within. All articles are free to reprint so long as they remain unchanged, the "About the Author" section remains, all hyperlinks are preserved, and the rel="nofollow" tag is not added to the hyperlinks.
