Spam is a real nuisance and the following are some ideas on its causes and prevention.
The following tips may help you comabt spam that is caused by your own website and your use of the internet.
What is spam
Think about spam for a moment. One person's spam is another person's eagerly awaited message. Consider the pictures in the National Gallery in London. There are pictures depicting women in a particular way but these are considered works of art by most people. Similar images sent on an email may well be considered as very unsuitable. The point is that what constitutes spam is a value judgment. It is easy to think that spam should be automatically filtered but to do this a computer needs a set of rules and these are based on someone's ideas of what constitutes spam. What spam filtering amounts to is censorship and if you use any spam filtering techniques there is always the possibility that an email you want from a genuine client falls foul of the spam filtering rules and gets filtered out. If you use any spam filtering techniques you need to think long and hard about whether the strategy you are employing might deprive you of any emails that you want. This needs to counterbalance the time saved by having some computer software filter emails for you.
Why do Spammers send our messages?
Why do they send out spams that most people bin straight away? Spammers rely on sending out hundreds of thousands of emails a day. This process is very cheap for them. If just a handful of people buy products then this cash flow is enough to make the process of spamming lucrative for the people employing the process.
Problem 1 - If you have your email address on your web site displayed
- as text
- as a clickable link set to open a ready-addressed email
- or you have a form which people fill in and then click submit
then the email trawling programs used by spammers can collect your email address as their software reads your web pages.
Solution 1 - You could remove your email links on the web pages so the spam trawlers have no address to collect. However, this will make it far harder for genuine clients to contact you. This may be 'shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted' as you will al;ready be on many spammers lists if your email link has already been on your web site.
You could make your email link into a non-clickable graphic and make people type in your email address when they want to send you an email but again you may well loose customers if you do this.
Problem 2 - If you give your email address away to other web sites, lists or people then your email address may get out into spammers lists.
Solution 2 - Try to avoid doing this or have a second, perhaps hotmail address, that you use for dubious sites. It goes without saying that you need to be very cautious with your personal details around web sites which might be run by untrustworthy people.
Problem 3 - bulk mailing lists. There are lists od email addresses collated and sold on and you might well be on these
Solution 3 - None other than change your email address.
Problem 4 - Having anything@domainname.co.uk set to deliver onto you means that spammers can use any address at your domain e.g. 5tyhjn@domainname.co.uk
Solution 4 - On your web server control panel go in and adjust the email so that say only info@domainname.co.uk is forwarded onto you and any messages sent to other email addresses such as enquiries@domainname.co.uk are deleted or bounced back to the sender.
Problem 5 - Lots of messages download onto my computer when I go to collect email but many of them are spam.
Solution 5 - Consider using a program like Norton Anti-Spam on your computer. You still have to download all the spam emails but such software is pretty good at siphoning the spam into a separate folder and just allowing genuine emails into your inbox. Periodically you can check the contents of the spam folder and then delete the contents.
Problem 6 - If you are getting a lot of emails with messages to the effect that they have been returned to you then what may be happening is that some spammer is using your email address as the reply address on the emails they send out. If these are rejected by the recipient then they get returned to you even though you did not send them. On occasions this can amount to a torrent
Solution 6 - Do not email the spammer to stop doing this as this often just encourages them by confirming your email address is active. Generally the flood of returned messages subsides after a while so be patient.
Problem 7 - I want to stop the, perhaps hundreds of, email spam messages being downloaded by my email software.
Solution 7 - Many email suppliers can offer anti-spam solutions on the server. However, this still means that useful messages may get filtered you and so you would do well to check the filtered messages periodically.
A useful stategy is a combination of the above namely:
- allowing only selected email addresses
- using Anti-Spam software on the server
- using Norton Anti-Spam on your computer
- being careful where I place my email address and do not give it out to readily
- have a second email address like a hotmail account that you can easily abandon if it gets abused
Everything Exmoor is designed to help
The first thing to say is that Everything Exmoor has been set up to protect you from spam as far as possible. If you have a business listing within the Everything Exmoor Directory then your email address is kept locked within our system and so any spam trawling software reading the business directory will not be able to get at your email address. Most other websites with simple links Real people looking at your listing will still, however, will be able to contact you using the Send Message button on your listing. This arrangement is designed specifically to protect your privacy.
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