Is Your Website a Spam Magnet?

So you put your new website online, with your e-mail address in plain sight on your “Contact Us” form.  But then the amount of junk mail in your inbox seemed to triple overnight!  What happened?  It could be that your site has unknowingly become a “Spam Magnet”.

Here’s why it happened - and even more importantly - how to stop it.

First, realize that people who are out to send unsolicited “spam” email don’t sit at their computers and hunt down email addresses.  They’ve written or bought programs that harvest these email addresses for them. 

A common web design oversight is to place your email address on your Contact Us page, in the hopes that customers will write to you.  Unfortunately, this is also the perfect bait for spam email harvesters, who greedily gobble up email addresses like yours and prepare to invade your inbox with offers of fake watches and male enhancement pills.

How do you stop it?

First, there’s nothing you can do to remove yourself from the spam lists.  Even if there’s a supposed “Unsubscribe” link at the bottom - don’t click it!  Not only will it NOT unsubscribe you, but it will tell the spammer “there’s a real person here!” and the onslaught of junk email will only get worse.

To help curb the spam, I recommend using Mailwasher Pro, a software program that works with any e-mail account, including those on AOL, MSN/Hotmail and other services.  Mailwasher Pro “learns” how to identify junk mail and legitimate mail based on what you tell it.   And at $39.95 with free lifetime updates, it’s a great weapon in the anti-spam arsenal of any PC user.

Read more about Mailwasher Pro here:
http://www.firetrust.com/products/mailwasher-pro/?q=products/mailwasher-pro

Stopping the Spread of Spam from Your Website

Rather than placing your email address on the web for all to see, consider using an online form instead.  With a form, you can be confident that your e-mail address is hidden, and spam harvesters won’t waste time trying to figure out how to get through (there are much easier e-mail pickings to be had on other websites!)

If you already have an online form and a spam removing program or web service, and the junk keeps coming through your form, consider adding a “CAPTCHA” - a random set of letters and numbers that are easily read by the human eye (and audio versions exist for the visually-impaired), but confuse computers.

To get a free “CAPTCHA” service for your web form, visit Carnegie Mellon University’s reCAPTCHA program at www.recaptcha.com

If you need help adding an online contact form to your website, or would like to add a captcha service to your page, contact iElectrify for a free quote!

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