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How to Prevent Spam Attacks – Protecting Your Inbox

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Art
Art
Web Hosting Geek

Spam is by far the most annoying concept in existence on the internet, aggravating thousands of webmasters and contributing to the defacing of just as many websites on a daily basis. Spam wastes time, money, server space, and energy, by clogging up email boxes, and even worse, cluttering the comments sections of nearly every unsecured blog. Spam is like the prank phone call of the internet, and in order to stop it, you’ll need to take a few measures that will prevent spammers form accessing the information they need.

Email Privacy

Perhaps the most common form of spam is email spam, which reduces your productivity by populating your inbox with unwanted spam posts. To avoid the aggravation associated with email spam, you should consider keeping your email private at any expense. That means you should not post your email address on forums, chat rooms, blogs, websites, or any other venues that can be publicly viewed by spammers. If you absolutely must to display your email address publicly online, then consider writing it without the @ symbol. For example – nospamexampleemailaddress at exampleemail dot com. The reasoning behind this is actually quite simple; spammers usually use programs that automatically search the web and scrape lists of email addresses by searching for @ symbols. Writing your email address in the above format is a great way to prevent spammers form finding your email address automatically.

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Preventing Contact Form Attacks

Another way spammers can access your business email is through the “Contact Us” form on your website. If you have a contact form enabled on your website, you’ll need to make sure you have security measures in place to prevent spammers from using bots to repeatedly send emails through your contact form. Spammers love using this method to exploit business inboxes, because most contact forms only require a few simple fields to be filled out, such as name, email address, and subject. To prevent spam attacks from automated bots through your contact form, you’ll need to require the use of a Captcha form, which only a valid human could fill out.

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Captcha

The Captcha test is is an entry field that is used to prevent hackers from exploiting sites with automated programs. If you have ever created an email account, then you have probably seen a Captcha form before. Captcha basically generates an image complete with a variety of letters and characters, and then requires the user to input the information on the screen. In the early days o Captcha, the images generated were simple, and as hackers adjusted to these Captcha images, the developers had to increase the difficulty of these images. The modern versions of the Captcha system consist of two to three words and are very difficult to circumvent.

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Conclusion

Although spam is a common problem and is not going to disappear any time soon, there are measures that can be taken to keep spammers from targeting your email. The first step in preventing spam would be following the recommendations above and using common sense when it comes to distributing your business email address. If you’re still having trouble with spam attacks from more determined individuals like your competitors, then you may want to employ the services of a spam blocking program.

Comments

1 Comment

  • Avatar Jen says:

    Good advice on avoiding spam. I hate it when my inbox is spammy because it’s where all of my “real” correspondence goes as well. I completely agree about keeping your email private or using a separate one for public use — that will at least protect your main account!

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