Reducing SPAM
SPAM, the common term for unsolicited email is an annoying reality faced by any user of email. Given the ease and low cost to those who would send thousands or millions of SPAM messages, there is little hope that the problem of SPAM will go away anytime soon. So how can you reduce your exposure to SPAM?
1. Use more than one email address
Consider creating more than one email address. Use one for your legitimate email correspondence with family, friends, and colleagues. Use another for any online activity such as online shopping, posting to forums, leaving comments on blogs, and anything else which would possibly reveal your email address to people other than family, friends, and colleagues you email directly.
2. Use contact forms where possible
Rather than posting your email address on your website, consider using a contact form. This allows visitors to your site to send you email without having to open an email program, manually entering your address, etc. This has two advantages: First, visitors using public internet terminals (e.g. public library, internet cafe, etc.) won’t have to log into their email program. Secondly, posting your email address on your website makes it easy for nefarious people and their special email-harvesting programs to capture your address and add it to their list of SPAM victims. One drawback is that you may want to make your email address easily available to the people you want to contact you. Some people compromise by posting their email address on their website slightly modified, but still understandable to human eyes (e.g. “Email me at hostbaby (at) hostbaby (dot) com”).
Hostbaby wizard account holders have access to a great online contact form to allow web visitors to send in email. It includes a security code to ensure humans are using the form, not SPAM program. Learn more about it here.
3. Use less common email addresses
The most common email addresses are those that begin with “info”, “admin”, “webmin”, “contact”, and “me”. Because they are common, generators of SPAM will send email to those addresses since the probability is high they will work. You should consider avoiding creating email accounts with these names (ie. don’t use “info@yourdomain.com”, etc.).
4. Use SPAM filters
Preventing SPAM from even getting sent to you using the methods above is ideal, but eventually, SPAM will find its way to your email inbox. At that point, SPAM filters can offer relief.
Most email services include some sort of SPAM filters. These are services which inspect incoming email and make a judgment as to whether it is legitimate email or not. A good idea is to create a SPAM or Junk Mail folder and have suspected SPAM routed to that folder. You will want to inspect that folder occasionally as legitimate email may sometimes get improperly flagged as SPAM. Depending on your email system, you can tag such email as “Not Spam”, or add that email address to your white list. Conversely, if you seem to get a lot of SPAM from a particular site, you can restrict them by adding them to your black list. Many email clients (Outlook, Mac Mail, Thunderbird, etc.) also include their own SPAM filters and allow you to create “Rules” specific to the kind of spam you are receiving.
Hostbaby customers have access to Spam Assassin, which will allow you to configure how strict the filter will be, add address to your white list or black list, and to move suspicious email into a dedicated SPAM folder.
