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Eight Proven Ways to Protect Your Company from Spam

Written by: Bryan Bowers

Article Overview: This article includes eight proven ways to protect your company from spammers.

Eight Proven Ways to Protect Your Company from Spam

1. Remove email addresses from your website. Spammers use automated tools called “address harvesters” to search through thousands of web pages per hour and extract all email addresses found.

2. Use a contact form that utilizes server scripts. Most “Contact Us” pages use a programming method that makes email addresses easy for spammers to locate. Ask your website designer to recreate your contact forms using server-based scripts (Active Server Pages, PHP, etc) or visit this website which generates the code for free. http://www.tele-pro.co.uk/scripts/contact_form/

3. Use private registration for all domains. When you registered your company’s website domain you were required to enter email address information. This email address is the primary method used by your domain registrar (Network Solutions, Go Daddy, Yahoo, etc) to contact you. Unfortunately spammers can query this email address and begin spamming your company. The major domain registrars now offer a domain privacy option which hides your contact information for a nominal fee ($7 - $9 a year).

4. Do not use generic email addresses. Spammers always try to send spam to common email addresses (info@, sales@, support@, help@, etc). If you are going to use a generic address, then make it difficult to guess what it is by appending a number to it (info44@, sales71@, 39support@, etc).

5. Restrict autoresponders on your email server. Autoresponders send an automatic response when an email is sent to your company. Examples of these include out of office replies, order confirmation messages, etc. Normally spammers don’t receive a response, so they do not know if an email address is valid. You can either disable autoresponders, limit them to respond only to employees (for out of office messages), or require that a condition must be met (perhaps a specific subject line), to prevent spammers from getting a reply back.




6. Protect your employee computers from viruses and spyware. Malicious programs such as viruses and spyware will search a computer for email addresses and send them back to the spammer. The spammer will then have your entire company’s address book and begin sending messages to all of your employees.

7. Restrict employees use of newsgroups, wikis and blogs. While there are legitimate business reasons to use these collaborative technologies, employees must exercise caution. Newsgroups, wikis and blogs are web-based discussion sites that allow people to post questions and receive answers to any type of problem from anyone around the world. People usually enter their email addresses to receive notifications. Spammers will search these sites and harvest all of the email addresses that have been posted. Restrict employees from using their email addresses on these sites or require them to use a “free” email account like Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail.

8. Disable automatic picture downloads in your email program. It is very common for email messages to include graphics or other formatting to make them more visually appealing. Unfortunately, spammers use web bugs (hidden graphics in spam messages) to allow them to identify when a message has been read and who read it. Most email programs give you the ability to prevent graphics from being displayed, thus preventing spammers from knowing if a message has been read.

All of the steps listed above will prevent spammers from capturing email addresses at your company once you make the changes. Unfortunately, it will not reduce the level of spam you are currently receiving since some spammers already have your email addresses. These spammers can also share your email addresses with other spammers causing an endless cycle of spam.

The only effective way to eliminate your current volume of spam is to begin using spam filtering. We offer a spam filtering service that is the best in the industry and is proven the most effective at stopping spam dead in its tracks! Our customers absolutely love our service and we know you will be amazed at what our service can do for your company too. You don’t need to purchase any hardware or software, there are no long term contracts to sign, and you can terminate service at any time. It’s completely risk free! We’re so convinced that you will love our service that if you call us today we’ll give you a free 30 day trial.

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