Forms of Spam Control?

03 Apr 07 5:09 pm

I've had this happen as well. I think it can happen when you have catch all accounts. Have you done this? If so, try removing it and seeing if it makes a difference.

03 Apr 07 10:52 pm

A catch all account means that any email sent to your domain will be forwarded to this account. So even if people send email to [email protected], you'll get it.

The idea with this is that people who might not actually have a contact with your company might send email to [email protected], or [email protected], hoping to hit on an address that works. Or they might misspell a name. In theory, it's nice that the email actually gets through. But in reality it's a nightmare for spam. A lot of hosting providers disable this function because of the spam problem. If you dig through your cPanel you can probably find it too.

Check with your webhost about getting SpamAssassin -- it's pretty standard, and if it's not on your account then you can probably pay a little more to have it. If you enable SpamAssassin, it will then tag all emails with [Spam?] [Definitely spam?] [Disarmed] etc.

You can then set up a filter either on your server or on your email client to send these into a spam folder or delete them permanently. I would recommend getting rid of these emails on a server level, because downloading spam emails, even if you don't open them, can expose your computer to all sorts of nasties. Not to mention using up unnecessary bandwidth.

Hope that helps,
Mark

04 Apr 07 10:41 pm

Another thing you can do if you want your email address to appear on your site is to make a small image with your address on it.

Depending on how you've made your contact form, you might still get spam through that. The spam bots can usually find the address the form sends to.

I do strongly recommend asking about getting SpamAssassin on your account. In some cases it's just a case of putting up a bunch of gates that the spam has to get through to reach you. I've seen people set up SpamAssassin to tag spam, a filter to delete mail marked as spam or definitely spam by SpamAssassin, and then forward it all to a Gmail account which will filter out any messages that sneak through, and then set Gmail up to forward it all back to a yourdomain.com address.

I'm not saying you need to go to these lengths. Just find something that works for you. You could also get around the no SpamAssassin problem by routing all your email through a Gmail account, which then forwards email back to a different yourdomain.com address. If I know Google, they'll have some pretty sophisticated spam filters on Gmail.

Get creative! And know that we all feel your pain ;)

Mark

05 Apr 07 8:27 pm

You can also use http://captchas.net/