how to help eliminate Spam

The Scourge of Spam

Also known as:

• UBE: unsolicited bulk email
• UCE: unsolicited commercial email

The important considerations here are that Spam is

• unsolicited - you haven't asked for it
• bulk - it is sent out to large numbers of recipients
• commercial - the sender hopes to make some money out of it

Spammers usually obtain their email addresses from robots programmed to collect them from websites.

• Any UNPROTECTED email address on any website is a potential target for a Spam robot!
• Any email address on any website is a potential target for a human Spammer.

How to protect your email address

There is no 100% safe way to protect your email address, but there are some ways to minimise likely abuse:

1. Never give your email address to someone you don't trust
2. Do not put any email addresses on your website - protect your friends and colleagues as well as yourself
   • Use a contact form instead, one that does not have any email address in the code
   • If you have PHP on your server, I can do this for you
3. Ensure your email address does not appear in the code of your website
   • Some mail forms have email addresses in the code, which can be collected by the robots
   • Some HTML pages have email addresses in meta tags in the head, which can be collected by the robots
4. Ensure your email address does not appear on other websites
   • Do a web search for your email address
   • Contact the owners of websites who are displaying your email address and ask them to replace it with a link to your website
   • Use a number of search engines to get the maximum number of results
5. If your email address must appear on any website, ensure it is PROTECTED
   • I can help with this
   • Protection is not guaranteed 100%, a human Spammer can still collect it
   • It is still very effective

Already a victim of Spam?

None of the above will help an email address already being Spammed.

If you MUST keep your abused email address, you will have to manage with server side and client side Spam filtering. Server side filtering is provided by your ISP and/or web host. Client side filtering is that which is built into your email program.

Spam filtering is getting quite good, but it is still quite a hassle.

If at all possible, the better alternative is to change your email address to a new one, and implement the strategies mentioned above.