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Some ways to reduce the amount of spam you are receiving are:
Disable your catchall email address in your admin section.
Spammers sometimes guess,
and sometimes employ dictionary spam attacks (that is, appending words from a
dictionary to your website address such as John@yourdomain.co.uk etc.),
barraging you with unwanted email, so disabling the catchall is extremely
helpful. Set up the email addresses you want such as sales@yourdomain.co.uk,
support@yourdomain.co.uk, joeblogs@yourdomain.co.uk, etc by selecting the
setup forwarding from your admin section.
Do not display email
addresses on your website.
Spammers use automated
programs to collect email addresses on web pages and will then sell them on to
more spammers. Once your email address has been live on your site for a few
months, the spammers have most probably got it.
Also try not to display your email address in newsgroup postings and chat
rooms.
Use protected forms for email.
Ask your web designer to
use email forms instead of plain email addresses. The problem is this is
sometimes not enough as most email forms display an error message (which
includes the webmaster email address) if the form is not filled out when the
send button is clicked. Spammers have found a way to trigger this without
actually visiting your website. Get your email form to display a message when
the form hasn't been filled out. For example, you have not completed this form
please fill out and click the Send button.
Check the privacy policy when you submit your address to a website.
See if it allows the
company to sell your address. You may want to opt out of this provision, if
possible, or not submit your address at all to websites that won't protect it.
Use two e-mail addresses.
Why not use two email
addresses, one for personal use and one for newsgroups and chat rooms.
Do not use generic email addresses.
Even if your email
address is not displayed on your website, addresses like info@yourdomain.co.uk
are so common spammers know to try it. Try to think of something more unique.
SPAM
Management Software
Your
internet service provider and/or domain administration may be able to install
SPAM Assassin or similar software on the server to prevent you from receiving
SPAM. The downside of this is that it may block e-mail that you want.
An
alternative is to install an anti SPAM management software on your own
computer, although this only works if you are using Outlook or a similar
e-mail client. It does not work for web based e-mail such as gmail or hotmail.
There are
numerous paid for options, such as AVG,
Avast,
Norton, and McAfee.
Some options
are free, with potions to upgrade to more complete services, such as
Spamfighter and
BullGuard.
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