How to reduce spam

SPAM is the one thing that is certain with the Internet, and there are few people who have not experienced at least one spam email. Whether annoying or time-wasting, or actually offensive and rude, follow these steps to eliminate it.

Spam type number one- random attacks

Many spam is just sent to random addresses, in the hope of someone receiving them. Try these XX tips to stop random attack spam

1. Do not have a catch-all email address

A catch-all email address will receive all email sent to your domain that does not have a email address set up for it. For example, lskadjfh@yourdomain.com will go to catch-all-email-address@yourdomain.com, whereas a legitimate domain, such as sales@yourdomain, will go to the actual sales@yourdomain.com account.

By turning off a catchall email address, you will greatly reduce random attack spam, since you will only receive the mail of a legitimate address. This does however mean that if a customer sent an email to saels@yourdomain.com by accident, they would receive a mailer-daemon return email, and may be discouraged from buying from you.

2. Do not use common email address

Spammers know that email addresses like sales@your-domain.com are likely to be in use, so target these addresses specifically. Use different addresses to stop this, such as salesdepartment@your-domain.com. This will stop all random attack spam if used in conjunction to tip number one, however as soon as a spammer discovers your new email address, you will need to change it. However, this may pose a problem to a customer when they try to contact you. An auto-responder telling your customer who to email may help, if they email the wrong address.

Spam type number two- targeted spam

The other type of spam is when a spammer discovers your email address from somewhere, and sends email to it.

3. Do not post your email address anywhere on the Internet

Spammers use a spider to collect email addresses from the web, and can discover your email address easily, if you post it. Always either post it as email at your-domain dot com, or better still, use JavaScript to disguise it (scripts are available at javascript-source.com) or post it as an image. This is a very effective way of stopping spam.

4. Always select NOT to have your email address passed on when entering your email address on a form.

This will stop spammers or even legitimate companies from emailing you. Never give an email address to a site which doesn't look 100% legitimate, as they may spam you. Remember, once one spammer has your email, they will sell it to other spammers.

5. Use a spam filter to reduce spam that reaches your inbox.

They use a number of techniques to decide whether an email is spam, though are occasional wrong, and so could lose you legitimate emails. Good ones to use are MailScanner, and SpamAssassin.

These tips, if follow, should reduce the amount of spam reaching your inbox by a significant amount. Think about doing the following two steps to stop spam for everyone.

6. Sign up to Spamcop

If signed up to Spamcop, you can report all spam to it. It will then find out which data center it was sent from, and will stop the spammer from being able to send spam from that location. While it won't reduce spam to you that much, it will reduce spam in general, so consider signing up to it.

7. Place a random email address link on your website

If you have a website, consider linking to a random email address script- this will fill the mailing list of the spammer with useless addresses, wasting their time and possibly crashing their server. Ones to use are at www.iwebtool.com/webmasters/antispam/ or www.bfndevelopment.com/cgi-bin/home/Members/fMail/Contacts/13647/List.html

These tips will all stop spam from reaching you, and will help stop the spread of spam on the Internet. One day, spam might not be around... but until then, have fun spam busting!

About the Author:
Tim Shaw is CEO of Big Wow Web Hosting, a cheap and reliable web host. Visit them today for cheap web hosting, and email customer support with coupon code MS10 to get 10% off MailScanner, and stop spam from reaching you.
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