What You Can Do to Reduce Email Spam
Here are some ways you can reduce the amount of Spam messages you receive:
- Do not put your “real” email on your website. We can set up an alias email for you that is used on the website and goes to your regular email behind the scenes. This may not help that much if your current email address has already been picked up by the spammers.
- Have the email you do put on your website encoded. Even though it is an alias, people may make a note of the address listed on your website and you do not want to change it very often.
- Use an alias email (that goes to your regular email addreess) for any contact type form and do not use that alias anywhere else so it can be thrown away if it starts getting lots of spam — and the address used by the form will be picked up.
- Whenever you post on any website, or sign up for anything online or offline, or if you belong to a list serv or get a newsletter use an alias email address that redirects to your “real” address – most of our website customers can have unlimited alias addresses. These can be thrown away later if they are picked up – remember where you used your aliases so you know who might be giving out your email address and who you might want to notify when you change an alias.
- We have server side spam filters which will quarantine suspected spam but if you do that you must check the quarantine folder or your whole email box may get full and all email after that will bounce. Or we can set up the spam to “Tag and Deliver”. Or you can get an email program (Firefox has one) that learns what is spam and changes the color of suspected spam so you don’t have to think about it too much. (Warning: you can learn to trust these too much and lose legitimate email.) Almost anything you do can lose legitimate email even seeing every email and guessing what to throw away…
- If you want to get rid of your spam and start over you can change your email address but to do this right takes notifying everyone you know about the change, putting an autoresponder on the old address for many months, continuing to check the old address for those months to make sure you aren’t missing someone who is suddenly writing you after years or who forgot that you told them you are changing (and while checking that email deleting the junk so that box doesn’t get full). And even after all this someone will try to reach you years later at that old address… But this will allow you to start spam free and if thereafter you only use your real email address to respond to people you want to be in touch with, you can be relatively spam free for a long time. But even that kind of protection may not be forever. Spammers are always learning new tricks.
- In other words there are no easy answers. But sometimes one just has to do something.
If you have questions about aliases or anything else, let us know. Call (505) 341-3060 or email me