We’ve all encountered some form of spam or unwanted advertisements in our emails and blogs. Some are ads wanting you to purchase medications or scams that inform you that you have won the Nigerian lottery. Going through each message or comment can be a time consuming process. So here are three steps you can take to kill off spam.
Email Spam Filters
Make sure your web hosting provider has spam filters running on all of your incoming email messages. The filters will check each bit of the message to ensure that it is genuine and not junk. Filters such as Spam Assassin and Postini work wonders if you receive hundreds of emails daily. But be aware that every now and then non-spam messages may get trapped in these filters and never delivered to your inbox.
Blog Spam Plugins
Blog comment spam can seriously hurt your website’s credibility and even its search engine ranking. Thankfully, there are many plugins you can use for your blog, especially if it is powered by Wordpress. Two of the most popular plugins to filter out spam comments is Akismet and Spam Karma. By having one of these plugins active will cut back on hundreds to thousands of spammy comments and allow you to be more productive doing what you love best.
Automatic Form Spam
Forms on your website can fall victim to spam as well or even worse be hijacked by hackers. Cut down on attacks and spam on your forms by implementing CAPTCHAs. A CAPTCHA is a human check puzzle that can be a randomly generated word within an image or a simple math problem. This human check process stops numerous automated form submissions or even form hijackings.
Spam can be the root of all evil and even put a damper on your day. With the above steps, you can easily cut back on the amount of spam on your website or in your inbox. Be more productive now, instead of sorting through countless hours of spammy messages.
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Another good tip we tell people: You should also get your hosting company to remove all catchalls. Meaning you don’t want them to send you every message that goes to any word or letters “@yourdomain.com”.
@Andromeda - Excellent tip!
As an FYI, Postini (now Google Message Security) can be set to dump all messages not sent to a protected mailbox. This “Non-Account Bounce” feature eliminates all email traffic not destined for a legitimate user.
@Allen - Thanks for the info.
You also could use temporary email address from my site http://www.mytrashmail.com. Its completely free and will help you bigtime.
@Michael - Thanks for the info on your service.
My 2 cents - Never never ever create a mailto: link that contains your email address! And never never even publish your email address in your website. There are too many spam bots out there actively crawling for email addresses.
What I suggest you guys to do is to publish your email using ‘human readable’ way. What I mean is instead of publishing myemail@mysite.com, you can write as follows.
myemail AT mywebsite.com (replace AT with @)
or
myemai#mywebsite.com (replace # with @)
Which is easily understood by human but not robot. Of course it still won’t stop spammer from adding your email address manually to their victim list.
Another thing to note is to use privacy protected whois for your domain name. This is to avoid spammers crawling your domain whois to get your email address.
Lastly, avoid using common email address like sales@mysite.com, support@mysite.com, webmaster@mysite.com etc. because spammers will send out spams assuming them as valid email addresses.