Spam Prevention

The eternal question, How do I get less spam?

Well let’s talk about how spammers get your email address.

1. Simple email names on well SEO’d domains. For example having info@myhighrankingdomain.com will get you a ton of spam. Bots user dictionary lists and will just sent spam to every name in the dictionary list at a domain. Having a well SEO’d domain will just get you found faster by bots. So try to avoid using simple words like info or webmaster and first names like joe or mike or bob. A good idea would be to use your first initial and your last name. This is much less likely to be in spammers dictionaries.
2. Don’t have your email as plaintext on your website. An email in plain text on a website is far too easy for a bot to find and add to a list. There are tools for obfuscating an email address for use in a mailto link. http://alicorna.com/obfuscator.html
3. Never respond to spam. Ever. Period. Most spam is from spoofed email addresses so replying is pointless. Never click the unsubscribe link. By doing this you are telling a spammer that your email account exists and that you are reading all the mail in it. This makes your email far more valuable and will be sold to many a more spammer.

What else can I do?

Don’t use an email forward from a REW email account to another email account. This is because the secondary email account doesn’t trust the REW email servers. If it starts to get a lot of spam being forwarded to it from REW it will put our server on a black list and mark all the mail from us to you as spam or worse, get our server blocked by your ISP or mail provider.

I hope you can use this information to help prevent your mailbox from overflowing with spam.
 

Update: April 22, 2008

I have tested by theory about account names. I created an info accunt and an account with a bunch of random letters. 24 hours later the info@ had 16 messages, the other one had 0. So using names that are less lokely to be in a dictionary will definately help save you from spam.

• Rate this Post!

  Select Your Rating:

  • 5 Stars (Excellent!)
  • 4 Stars
  • 3 Stars
  • 2 Stars
  • 1 Stars (Poor)

• Share this Post

  Share With A Friend:

  Your Name Your Email

  Friend's Name Friend's Email

  Optional Message

  Send

• Print
• Social Bookmarking

  Add to Bookmarks: