How to deal with email spam

Dealing with email spam is like putting up with house flies and picnic ants -- it comes with the territory. And if you have a wide web presence, the spam will come in droves.

I receive up to 100 pieces of email spam per day and have become accustomed to deleting them. The more visible you are on the Web as search engines pick you up, the more spammers will find you and spam both visible and non-visible emails.

Beating the spammers is not easy. There are highly intelligent email spam applications that will send thousands of emails by creating random combinations of names to a single domain name.

For example:
marketing@domain-name.com
info@domain-name.com
sales@domain-name.com
customer@domain-name.com

Fortunately, there are some popular ways to handle incoming email spam. Here's how:

1) Graphic Email Links
Remove all visible email hyperlinks from all your website pages and replace them with a graphic of your email ID or simply type out your email in text as yourname (at) domain.com. Using this method, you are assuming your website visitors will recognize that they need to remember and manually type out your email replacing (at) with @.

By removing all the email links in your website pages it's highly unlikely that spam-robots will find and detect your email ID.

Advantage: Cuts down on some spam (not all, but some).
Disadvantage: Makes it difficult for someone to quickly send you an email (when you remove the email hyperlink. This may also make the potential sender think your email link is broken).

2) Email Form Security Scripts
You can have a developer install security scripts nto all web forms. This type of system requires a user to enter a random code in ANY web form before they hit the submit button.

Advantage: Cuts down on most spam (not all, but most).
Disadvantage: Doing this makes it a little more difficult for someone filling out your web-based form. The less you require a person to do in order to contact you, the better.
See example: beta.search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx?

3) Postini Email Filter
If you are a www.hostmysite.com client, you may request they activate the Postini Mail Filter. You get one Postini Filter for one email account for free. Additional Postini Filters are 1.00 per email, per month.

Advantage: Cuts down on some spam. (not all, but some).
Disadvantage: You'll need to login to your account on the Positini website to weed through the email that the system has captured and identified as spam. In some cases I have had one or two client emails captured as spam that I would not want to miss. The system allows you to delete emails or forward any captured emails to your regular inbox. No email filter system or application is perfect.
Re: hostmysite.com/services/postini
(Postini is now owned by Google)

4) AppRiver Spam Filtering
You can use a 3rd party solution company such as AppRiver, http://www.appriver.com. In this system, all your email traffic is diverted to their servers where they identify the spam for you.

Advantage: Cuts down on most spam (not all, but most). If some gets through, you can let them know and they'll put it on a block list.
Disadvantage: If a customer or client email gets blocked or filtered, the only way you can find out is if they call you and ask if their emails are being received.

5) 3rd Party Email Providers
Some email providers such as Earthlink have a system called Spam Arrest that requires any person or system sending email to you to fill out an interim form to verify that you are the actual sender.

These systems have inherent pitfalls. An important email delivered to you via an automated system will get blocked without you knowing, such as a confirmation receipt of payment for a credit card or other important confirmation email.

6) Do Nothing
As a business owner with a wide web presence, dealing with spam is like putting up with house flies and picnic ants. Although I choose to use Postini, I still have to deal with spam. But I prefer not to put up any blocks or barriers between any existing or potential clients.

Advantage: All emails get through.
Disadvantage: All spam gets through too.

I am of the mindset that if you want the world to beat a path to your door, it’s better to keep the proverbial pathway clear and unencumbered. However, if you're getting 1,000 spam emails a day, then maybe it would be best to consider options 1, 2 and 3.

Related Articles;
Get Your Emails Delivered
Spam-wars

About the Author
Rick Vidallon is President of Visionefx, a Web design company based in Virginia Beach, Va. They provide services to national companies as well as small to medium businesses throughout the United States.
Rick can be reached at (757) 619-6456 or rick@visionefx.net.