Eight Proven Ways to Protect Your Company from Spam
1. Remove
email addresses from your website.
Spammers use automated tools called “address harvesters” to search
through thousands of web pages per hour and extract all email
addresses found.
2. Use
a contact form that utilizes server scripts.
Most
“Contact Us” pages use a programming method that makes email
addresses easy for spammers to locate. Ask your website designer to
recreate your contact forms using server-based scripts (Active
Server Pages, PHP, etc) or visit this website which generates the
code for free.
http://www.tele-pro.co.uk/scripts/contact_form/
3. Use
private registration for all domains.
When you
registered your company’s website domain you were required to enter
email address information. This email address is the primary method
used by your domain registrar (Network Solutions, Go Daddy, Yahoo,
etc) to contact you. Unfortunately spammers can query this email
address and begin spamming your company. The major domain
registrars now offer a domain privacy option which hides your
contact information for a nominal fee ($7 - $9 a year).
4. Do
not use generic email addresses.
Spammers always try to send spam to common email addresses (info@,
sales@, support@, help@, etc). If you are going to use a generic
address, then make it difficult to guess what it is by appending a
number to it (info44@, sales71@, 39support@, etc).
5. Restrict
autoresponders on your email server.
Autoresponders send an automatic response when an email is sent to
your company. Examples of these include out of office replies,
order confirmation messages, etc. Normally spammers don’t receive a
response, so they do not know if an email address is valid. You can
either disable autoresponders, limit them to respond only to
employees (for out of office messages), or require that a condition
must be met (perhaps a specific subject line), to prevent spammers
from getting a reply back.
6. Protect
your employee computers from viruses and spyware.
Malicious programs such as viruses and spyware will search a
computer for email addresses and send them back to the spammer. The
spammer will then have your entire company’s address book and begin
sending messages to all of your employees.
7. Restrict
employees use of newsgroups, wikis and blogs.
While there are legitimate business reasons to use these
collaborative technologies, employees must exercise caution.
Newsgroups, wikis and blogs are web-based discussion sites that
allow people to post questions and receive answers to any type of
problem from anyone around the world. People usually enter their
email addresses to receive notifications. Spammers will search
these sites and harvest all of the email addresses that have been
posted. Restrict employees from using their email addresses on
these sites or require them to use a “free” email account like
Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail.
8. Disable
automatic picture downloads in your email program.
It is very common for email messages to include graphics or other
formatting to make them more visually appealing. Unfortunately,
spammers use web bugs (hidden graphics in spam messages) to allow
them to identify when a message has been read and who read it. Most
email programs give you the ability to prevent graphics from being
displayed, thus preventing spammers from knowing if a message has
been read.
All of the steps
listed above will prevent spammers from capturing email addresses at
your company once you make the changes. Unfortunately, it will not
reduce the level of spam you are currently receiving since some
spammers already have your email addresses. These spammers can also
share your email addresses with other spammers causing an endless
cycle of spam.
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