I was recently asked by a small town client how to prevent spam in the email. There are lots of ways to prevent spam – and if you have a good email company, you should have a lot of what you’ll read here in place already. If you are running your own server, some of these may be ideas for you to institute if you have not done so.

Spam is generated very simply by distributing your email address. The most common ways to distribute your email are:

• in the signature at the bottom of an email address,
• in the From:, To: and Cc: lines of email messages,
• on business cards,
• in online forums, message boards, and lists (which is often against the policies of the forum/board/listserv),
• at tradeshows, conferences and networking events.

There are several solutions, some more effective than others, some more burdensome on the sender, and some that require you to do a bit of thinking before distributing your email address. Bots (robots or spiders) recognize email address two ways: using the “@” symbol and through use of widely used email domains, such as hotmail and gmail (and dozens others).

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I was recently asked by a small town client how to prevent spam in the email. There are lots of ways to prevent spam – and if you have a good email company, you should have a lot of what you’ll read here in place already. If you are running your own server, some of these may be ideas for you to institute if you have not done so.

Spam is generated very simply by distributing your email address. The most common ways to distribute your email are:

• in the signature at the bottom of an email address,
• in the From:, To: and Cc: lines of email messages,
• on business cards,
• in online forums, message boards, and lists (which is often against the policies of the forum/board/listserv),
• at tradeshows, conferences and networking events.

There are several solutions, some more effective than others, some more burdensome on the sender, and some that require you to do a bit of thinking before distributing your email address. Bots (robots or spiders) recognize email address two ways: using the “@” symbol and through use of widely used email domains, such as hotmail and gmail (and dozens others). Two of the more common preventative steps are:

1. Instead of writing your email address in a proper way like example@gmail.com, convert it to example|a|gmail [dot] com. Then explain it to others so they understand what you mean, like “Please convert |a| to @ and [dot] to “.”. Email addresses can be converted to anything you think is readable by humans, but not bots.
2. Encoding your email address into special values called character entities, which represent each character, is one method. Programs exist that will convert an email address to its encoded value, for use on a web site or anywhere you use the mailto HTML coding. For example, this is an encoded link for a webmaster email account (extra line breaks have been placed in the code so the width of the page is not broken – make sure the encoded parts you use are all on one line in your web page):

a href=”mailto:webmast
er@ohlone
.cc.ca.us”>
webmaster@
ohlone.cc.
ca.us

There is no guarantee that encoding your email address will prevent spam. Robots are created that are smart enough to decode the encoded address. It’s a game, of sorts, to spammers and coders.

Often, communities who maintain their own servers need to invest in these practices to save time for those running the server and email systems.

WHAT ELSE CAN YOU DO?

Don’t forward an email from someone you don’t know to a list of people. Those”forward this email to 20 of your friends” messages are perfect for harvesting email addresses. These types of sign-and-forward emails often appear in the form of a petition.

Avoid CC (carbon copy) for group emails you send out. If you send an email that might be forwarded on and on, it can easily be found by bots, who you can be sure will add the nice collection addresses to their spam address database. Instead use BCC (blind carbon copy). This means the recipients do not see the list of email addresses that your message has gone to – and prevents that “reply all” from getting to everyone, which is also good for email reading sanity. Encourage others to use BCC for groups instead of CC. Or ask to be removed from their email lists and announcements if they won’t do that.

Don’t use your home or business email address when you register on a Web site or in a group. If you must sign up for services, want to receive more info, register for newspapers or domains; use a free email address from a site like Yahoo or Hotmail to create an address especially for that purpose. This also goes for posting to the Web, on a list, newsgroup, on a contact page for a Web site, or on a resume that is posted on the Web. If you begin to get spam from that source, you can delete that account and open another.

Make sure your profile privacy settings are set so you don’t receive marketing from other sites.

Never use your email address as your screen name in chat rooms.

Create alias email addresses. Certain services allow you to generate multiple, anonymous email addresses that forward to your real email account. You can even reply to forwarded messages through your email account and have it appear as though you are replying through the generated one. This puts a level of anonymity between you and potential spammers. A good idea is to create a new email address for every website that you disclose your address to. If you start to get spam through that address, you know where the spam is coming from and you can delete the address and eliminate the spam.

WHAT MORE COULD BE DONE?

1. Disguise email addresses on your web site.
   As mentioned above, we could strip out periods and “@” symbols. For example, “YOURNAME AT YAHOO DOT COM.” We can also make the “@” an image, which will prevent crawlers from identifying it. You can do this in your signature file as well, in case your recipients forward your email.
2. Use a complicated email address.
   The more complicated the email address is, the less likely it is to be generated for targeting by a spammer’s software. Bots will look for the easy and obvious addresses first, such as those with identifiable names “alan@hotmail.com” as opposed to m0g33k@townofsomerset.
3. Use methodology that requires the sender to do a bit of work to manually correct the email address before their message can be sent. Examples of this include:

• username @ yourdomain.com (before the message is sent, ” @ ” must be changed to “@”; i.e., no spaces surrounding @)
• username AT yourdomain.com (before the message is sent, ” AT ” must be changed to “@”)
• username AT yourdomain dot com (before the message is sent, ” AT ” and ” dot ” must be changed to “@” and “.”)
• username @ yourdomain dot com (before the message is sent, ” @ ” and ” dot ” must be changed to “@” and “.”)
• username@yourdomain dot com (before the message is sent, ” dot ” must be changed to “.”)
• username@NOSPAMyourdomain.com (before the message is sent, “NOSPAM” must be removed)

4. Use images to represent email address
   Instead of using text, you can also use images to represent your email address.
5. Use forms to prevent spam on your website
   Forms can be used on your website for visitors to contact you. You can hide your email within the form code so email harvesting software cannot grab it from your web pages. Many companies do this now to keep control of their inboxes.
6. Create one “Contact Us” page and link to that page from all your other pages. This often frustrates users.
7. Change email servers periodically.
   This can be expensive and time consuming, but is similar to changing auditors.
8. Change emails annually. This, too, can be expensive and time consuming.
9. Use email as it is meant to be used, where there are less forwarders, and email is read and responded to from the server.

Gayley Knight is a guest blogger forGMI. She is Founder/Principal of Business Her Way (a social media management company). Delighting in opening the technology world for your company, Gayley draws on her extensive network and personal business experience to simplify your online world. Showing you best social business practices and simple tech tools designed to increase your business visibility brings social media into perspective, saving you time and money. You can contact her directly at http://www.businessherway.net or via email at gayley@mothergeek.com.

Tags: General

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 12:00 AM by greatmin and is filed under Wendy Troupe's Perspectives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.