Help, I'm Drowning in Spam

The problem of spam continues to be a pain in my clients' collective sides. While it's actually impossible to prevent you receiving spam altogether without accidentally blocking good emails, there are a few things that you can do to reduce the amount of spam that you receive.

1. Use contact forms on your website instead of displaying your email address. Spammers have computer programs that scour websites for the '@' symbol, harvesting large lists of email addresses to later bombard with spam. By hiding your email address behind a contact form, you can avoid this extremely common source of spam.

2. Add form validators to your contact forms. By adding some checks and balances to your contact forms, you can prevent lots of spam abuse. The level of protection is somewhat subjective because the more complex the checking is, the more likely you are to prevent legitimate emails from coming through, but a happy medium is usually the best option.

3. Avoid Info@ and other stereotypical email names. Almost every company has an “info@companyname.com” email address, and spammers know it. They tap into databases of website domain names and send emails out to all sorts of stock email addresses, a favorite of which is "info@". If you have an info@ email address, change your email address to something a little more unique, and you'll find you receive much less spam. Changing your email address can be a bit of a short-term pain, but it does offer a reprieve in unwanted email.

If you're a Page 1 Solutions client, our mail hosting also offers custom spam filtration controls. Call us if you'd like to discuss any possible solutions to your spam problems. We're always glad to help.

Jonathan Fashbaugh
Account Manager
Page 1 Solutions