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How to Prevent Spam Attacks – Protecting Your Inbox

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.

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.

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.

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.

Use Captcha To Keep Spammers At Bay

One of the first and most annoying things that can happen to a new web site owner is being blasted with spam.  There is a dilemma presented when wanting to have potential customers or clients contact you or your company.  Either your email has to be publicly posted or you will need to enable a form to allow quick and easy contact.  When you do implement either choice, spammers will come and they will do as much damage as is possible.

Email link – bad idea

The first thing that should be done is to toss out the idea of publicly placing your email address in any form that can be clicked as a link.  Using a linked email address publicly is an open invitation to spammers.  Nothing can be more unpleasant than having to start off your business day wading through hundreds upon hundreds of spam content in your email in-box.  If you must use this route, simply place your email in text only – this will make it harder for a potential spammer as they will have to physically copy and paste your address into any email.  Inconvenience is the bane of the spammer.

Contact form – can be attacked

If you’ve decided to place a contact form anywhere within your web site, you’ll want to enable some type of security to ensure that an actual human is utilizing the form.  This sounds simple enough because, after all, the purpose of the form is to gather human information.  However, most email forms have a standard “name”, “email”,  “subject”, “content” style to them that is easily recognized and exploited by spammers.  Using this standard information, spammers use automated systems to attack a contact form – computer to computer.  What can stump them is requiring something that only a human can input or answer and that isn’t part of the standard email form.  This is where Captcha comes in.

Contact form with Captcha – better idea

Captcha is a type of test that is used to ensure human interaction.  The premise behind Captcha is that computers should not be able to solve something that requires human input.  The very early implementations of Captcha were simple generations of a word or series of letters with some small amount of warping.  However, spammers quickly adjusted to this warping and this initial Captcha implementation had to be abandoned.  Modern Captcha uses two to three regular words that are segmented and have lines through the words making it much more difficult to automatically guess via a computer system.

This all culminates into a small bit of either PHP or Javascript that is placed within your form before the submit button coding.  After filling out the rest of the form, a user must then enter the correct words generated within the Captcha coding.  You can set the form to lock out a user after a certain number of errors thus staving off the possible attack of spammers for yet another day.

Conclusion

Of course, the simplest way to avoid spammers at all is by not allowing any sort of email contact within your site.  But this is not a feasible option – after all, you have your web site online for the purpose of contacting new and old customers or clients.  So, before putting your email form online, use a bit of quick security and incorporate Captcha.

Making Search Engine Traffic a Priority

Most online marketing approaches are risky and unfortunately, many of them will not result in the increased website traffic you desire.  Today’s internet marketing firms will try to sell you on everything from pop-up ads to mass email campaigns, both of which people tend to find very annoying.  Being that an email campaign is more like spam distribution and pop-up advertisements are so aggravating they could actually cause you to lose customers, investing in such marketing solutions just might equate to throwing money out the window.  Instead of wasting money on these risky strategies, perhaps you should focus on something that actually works – search engine optimization.

Boost Traffic the Natural Way

It is a proven fact that the most effective way to reel in targeted traffic and potential customers is through the search engines.  A number of studies show that nearly 90% of first-time visitors find their way to a website via search engines powered by internet brands such as Google and Yahoo.  You yourself are probably in this high percentile of web surfers who bypass all the pop-ups, spam messages and PPC ads by relying on the convenient search box to find the content you seek.  Search engines offer a consistent stream of targeted website visitors and in most cases, leveraging this traffic is absolutely free.  What you have to do is make sure your content is relevant to the search results because if it isn’t, visitors will likely be very disappointed when landing on your site.   If you keep this is mind when optimizing your site, the search engines will reward you with increased traffic of excellent quality.

When Users Search, Everybody Wins

Search engine traffic results in a win-win situation for anyone trying to promote a website or business online.  Improving your volume of traffic does take a lot of money or hard work for that matter.  All that is required of you is good site optimization.  Despite the millions of active domains throughout the world, an alarming number of web pages are not indexed by the major search engines for the simple fact that most of them are not optimized correctly, or not optimized at all.  Unless you have a winning marketing strategy that simply cannot fail, this makes it very difficult for anyone to find your website.  Though it can be a challenge, optimizing a website is also something that can be done by an individual with little to no marketing knowledge.

Believe it or not, the search engines want to send you as much traffic as possible.  This is because the more users who find the content they want, the more they will rely on that search engine and recommended it to others.  The actual search engine benefits tremendously as these recommendations lead to increased popularity and advertising revenues.  Search engines can be an excellent resource that helps internet users find what they desire and provide you with the targeted traffic needed to keep your site alive.

The Benefits of Email Hosting

Email hosting is designed for businesses that cannot or simply do not want to spend their precious time and resources on setting up and managing an internal messaging infrastructure.  This is very understandable because the continued maintenance and support can raise costs and also greatly increase the probability of virus infections, hardware and software problems.  All of these issues could leave your business without email functionality for hours and possibly days.

There are many benefits to outsourcing your messaging needs to a professional hosting company.  This article will go over some of the most significant.

Secure Webmail Access

Email hosting providers generally equip their mail servers with industry standard 128-bit encryption, which is active during the entire webmail session.  This essentially means that any data sent to and from the server is encrypted from the moment you sign in, until the moment you sign out.  With this proven security protocol, you can ensure that your sensitive messages will not be intercepted or compromised in any way.

Secure IMAP and POP Access

Businesses are increasingly opting for email hosting solutions because they enable secure access to desktop email clients through IMAP or POP.  All email traffic is encrypted, including user names and passwords sent from the email client to the mail server for authentication.  The best hosting providers support all the popular mail clients such as Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, Eudora, Mozilla Thunderbird and Apple Mail.  Some even offer support for Linux and BSD clients as well as PDAs and pocket PCs.  Whether you prefer to manage your mail on or offline, an email hosting plan can ensure that is done in an efficient and secure manner.

Adequate Storage Space

When signing up a for an email hosting account, you typically get a robust amount of storage for each mailbox created.  Some give you MB of storage, others give you GB per mailbox.  All tend to provide you with more than enough to efficiently store tens of thousands of messages.  A more flexible solution will allow you to easily upgrade as your storage needs increase.

Spam and Virus Filtering

A quality email hosting solution blocks potentially harmful mail before it even enters the network.  Anti-virus scanners are usually integrated into the host’s SMTP gateways while spam is dealt with in numerous ways.  A company that truly wants to help keep spam out your life will employ filtering methods such as blacklisting, whitelisting and greylisting, and allow you to make configurations that automatically sends it to a quarantine folder instead of your inbox.

Shared Address Book

The Address Book is a very useful feature in many email clients as it provides the user with a convenient way to store contact data for easy retrieval and use.  Most email hosts offer both a private and shared address book, along with access to public network directory services.  In many cases, the shared address book can be used with any mail client that supports LDAP directory services.

Email is such a prevalent method of communication that it can easily get out of hand over time. If you are no longer able to control your messaging infrastructure from within, it might be time to consider email hosting.

The Dangers of Insecure Web Applications

Software can be used for many great things but there is a gloomy dark side.  It also comes in the form of malicious programs and the web is literally infested with these harmful applications.  Sadly, thousands of internet users download malicious software everyday, blind to the fact that they are essentially inviting threats right into their systems.  These risks have the potential to be even more dangerous when a website is involved.  Any software code running on a web server poses a great threat for the mere fact that it contains an executable file.  This means that it can be executed by anyone in the world with an internet connection.  Just imagine if there was an executable file on your desktop computer that could be executed by anyone at anytime.  If this was the case, that program would have to completely secure in order to prevent the execution of malicious code on your system.  The same goes for programs consisting of PHP or CGI scripts.

What makes executable programs even worse is that many of them accept parameters such as a user name or email address, making them more vulnerable to exploitation.  Needless to say, the web was a lot safer some five to eight years ago when the internet phenomenon wasn’t as huge.  Today, hackers are highly skilled and more determined than ever.  They will do whatever it takes to break into home-based PCs, network servers, and even the applications on your website.  If your scripts are not probably secured, you stand the risk of losing essential data that can stir up all sorts of trouble.

Here are just a few examples of what can happen when your scripts are not properly secured:

Hijacking of your mail server: You may ask, “what’s the point?”.  The answer all boils down to legality.  Although you couldn’t tell on the surface, spam is illegal in most countries and if the authorities catch you doing it, you could find yourself in big trouble.  By hijacking the mail server, a spammer can use your domain to distribute mass mailings of spam.  When the authorities find out, it all leads back to you.

Hijacking of your website: Ever run across a family-friendly site and wondered why is was littered with pornographic images?  This my friend is website hijacking, more commonly known as defacing.  A poorly configured script can invite an intruder into your site, give them enough time to setup their own credentials and leave you out in the cold.

Attacks on other machines: Leave the door open for a hacker and they just might force you to participate in a strike against other machines.  Known as a DDoS attack, the hacker slips through your insecure script and installs a rootkit which opens a backdoor that gives them complete control over the server.  This could eventually cause problems for both you and your web host.

With the responsibility of administering the server, it is up to your web host to provide a secure environment.  As a webmaster however, it is up to you to make sure your web applications are properly scripted and secure.  Software can add instantly functionality to your site but if you’re not careful, it can also be your worst nightmare.