Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : Web Hosting Tutorials : Tips on Reducing Spam

[HostRefugee-Vince]

I thought it would be helpful if I posted a few ways I have almost totally eliminated spam from reaching my inbox.

#1 - In cPanel, set the default address to :fail:

This means that you must have a POP3 account or Mail Forwarder setup for every address@yourdomain.com that you actually want to receive mail at. Any other address@yourdomain will fail. (Which is good, because spammers usually target random email addresses).

#2 - Do NOT use any common email addresses. This includes (accounting, billing, sales, support, webmaster, abuse, ect... ect...)

Instead of having a POP3 or Fowarder for common addresses, setup an auto-responder instead. Your autoresponder could have a message similar to the following:

Were sorry, your message was NOT received. Due to the large amount of spam sent to common email addresses, sales@yourdomain.com is no longer a valid address.

If you are trying to reach the sales department, please email salesdept@yourdomain.com

This let's people who are really trying to reach you know the proper address to send mail to. Luckily spammers usually use fake addresses, and will never see the auto-reply.

#3 - If you want to list your email address on your website, make it an image. Spammers sometimes use automated software that searches web sites for email addresses. Luckily their software can not read email addresses if there an image.


#4 - Be cautious when filling out forms on the web. Alot of offers on the web are really just an attempt to get your email address. So if you don't fully trust a company, don't give them your email address. If you really want to give an email address to an untrusted company, create a yahoo or gmail account.

Using the 4 tips above, I am down to about 1 spam message every 6 months. I don't even need mail filters anymore (which never seemed to do the job properly anyways).

If anyone else has any tips to add to this, I would love to hear them!

Hopefully the above can help someone in the way it has helped me.

[MarbleHost.com]

If you already receive a lot of spam good solution is SpamBayes. This software works well with outlook. First, you train the program -- you select some good and some spam messages. SpamBayes will assign to every word some value. This values will be used to determine which message is spam or which is good. What I really like is the fact that I can determine what type of messages rate as spam.

Of course enabled spam filter on the server is always good idea

[alphatechsol]

On the listing an email address on a website a good tool to use is the email riddler at dynamicdrive. Just fill in the form and copy the code your site where you want to list the email address and it also supports using images for the display of the address as a picture. I don't have enough posts for links so you will have to do a Google search for dynamicdrive

[bear]

Instead of having a POP3 or Fowarder for common addresses, setup an auto-responder instead. Your autoresponder could have a message similar to the following:

Just note that the autoresponder will likely cause a lot of bounced mail in the queue, which on a heavily "infested" address could cause additional load. Otherwise good points.

[sprintserve]

Originally Posted by bear

Just note that the autoresponder will likely cause a lot of bounced mail in the queue, which on a heavily "infested" address could cause additional load. Otherwise good points.

That's precisely my thoughts as well as I read it. Spammers also sometimes use your domain. It can cause a nasty ping pong battle if your mail server did not recognize it as looping.

[eldawg]

Should 1) be ":fail:" or ":fail: no such address here" ??

[HostRefugee-Vince]

Originally Posted by sprintserve

That's precisely my thoughts as well as I read it. Spammers also sometimes use your domain. It can cause a nasty ping pong battle if your mail server did not recognize it as looping.

Never thought of that, and luckily it has never happened yet.... Or maybe it has and killed itself off without to many troubles.

Hmm... now I might have to test and see what happens

[HostRefugee-Vince]

Originally Posted by eldawg

Should 1) be ":fail:" or ":fail: no such address here" ??

Either one will work.

[Grubs]

Having obscure common department names eg. salesdept@domain.com instead of sales@domain.com only lets you off the hook for a while. What happens is that your customers save salesdept@domain.com in their address books and then after *they* get infected by viri and trojans your "safe" email address is havested and used as spoof addresses for spammers and email virusus.

If it gets too bad you can then put an autoresponder onto salesdept@domain.com and start up a new mynewsalesdept@domain.com address to get you through the next 12 months and so on... but in doing so you'll inconvenience your customers through the address change.

Personally I prefer to keep sales@domain.com and filter using POPfile (a baysian filter that is currently at 99.8 accuracy for us).

[HostRefugee-Vince]

It's been over 1 1/2 years and that hasn't happened yet. I don't intend on changing the address if it does happen though.

I have other domains which do use sales@domain.com... Even newly registered domains, within days of registering they start receiving spam at those types of addresses. I just find it easier to not use common addresses, because spammers will attempt them regardless of rather they have harvested the address or not.

About 99.9% of all email sent to sales@mydomain.com is spam... the other 0.1% is a client or potential client that gets a nice auto-response and promptly resends the email to the right address.

I do have sales@mydomain setup as a regular mailbox + auto-responder..and from time to time I will check it to see if any legitimate emails were missed. After nearly 2 years, I am pretty confident that I can delete that mailbox completly, and just leave the auto-response on.

Switching an email after using it for a long time may have a negative impact, but I set it up this way from day 1 and have had absolutly no problems. I don't recommend someone who has been using a common address for the last few years to run and switch to a less common address... because that could cause confusion for people who have contacted them the regular way for such a long time...

As far as newly registered sites go... I would reccommend this alternative 100%. It's problem free, and reduces spam like you would not believe... No Spam Filters Needed!!

[kiwami]

just had to pop in to say that YESTERDAY i read this post and decided to give it a try .. erase "sales@ webmaster@ support@ etc.." since most of my customers use forms to contact me anyway.
Yah.. so i woke up this morning expecting to see my usual 50 or so junk messages about making my penis bigger or secret stock options nothing but REAL mail .. i've got about 6 or so junk but on investigation they're being sent to other generic addresses that i had set up as forwarders.. GOOD POST, i really didn't expect that to make such a diffrence.

Installing software on my server is also something that i am looking into as well though as one of my clients is definately recieving too much spam.

[stdunbar]

Originally Posted by HostRefugee-Vince

#2 - Do NOT use any common email addresses. This includes (accounting, billing, sales, support, webmaster, abuse, ect... ect...)

Realize that you are violating RFC 2142 by removing the "abuse" alias. The "postmaster" alias is covered by RFC 822.


<<< autoresponder concerns addressed already >>>

[HostRefugee-Vince]

Originally Posted by stdunbar

Realize that you are violating RFC 2142 by removing the "abuse" alias. The "postmaster" alias is covered by RFC 822.


<<< autoresponder concerns addressed already >>>

There obviously is some addresses you should leave alone. I didn't think of that while posting my originally message. Thanks for bringing this point up to others reading this thread.

[tlinu]

I find using "Boxtrapper" is an excellant way to fight spam mail, since the day I used it, my mail box is always clean.

[Decryptic]

Wow, great post. This really enlightened me on anti-spam techniques. What I've always done with my websites is to use some type of javascript encoder form, to encrypt my actual email in the POST script fields. Then of course, I always used form mail, instead of having my emails in plain text, which is just asking to be spammed. I never looked at auto-responders beyond the use of vacation messages like this. And to think, I might be missing out on some legitimate customers.