How to avoid getting spam email.

I have been working with a client on some recent spam issues he has been having. Spam is an annoyance. There’s no way around that fact. There is, however, a way to minimize your risk of getting spammed on your web hosting account’s email addresses. Here are a few tips on how to avoid getting spam email.

1. Don’t put your email address on your website. Have you ever seen a contact page on a website have an email address written like “email [AT] website.com”? The reason for this is that many spammers have bots that crawl websites looking for email addresses. If you have an email address listed on your website, chances are it will get picked up and added to a list.

2. Add Captchas to forms. As is the same with bots scanning websites for emails, bots also scan websites for email forms. If you have any type of contact form you should have some sort of captcha, or human verification, to make sure that it is not a computer program trying to spam your inbox.

3. Use a generic email for any forms or contact addresses on your page. There is always the chance that a spammer will be able to get through a captcha or the steps taken in #1. They get more creative as time goes by. Using an email like “contact@” or “info@” will keep these spam messages out of your personal inbox.

4. Set up spam filters. Most, if not all cPanel hosts, will offer some sort of spam filtering option. It is a quick way to stop most spam from even getting to you. Setting up user level filters will allow you to automatically reject emails by keyword, subject, email address, or any number of variables you want to add.

These are all relatively easy things to implement and can all be controlled by you on your website. The bottom line is that you should be careful with where your email address shows up on the internet. Any time it’s on a publicly available page it runs the risk of being grabbed by a spammer.