The Great SPAM Scam

Date published: 2013-09-01

We have all heard the line that SPAM is costing industry millions of dollars, the truth is that SPAM is easily avoidable. Hundreds of IT workers are employed to find SPAM solutions when a little bit of education is all that's needed.

To avoid SPAM:
• Do not publish your email address on your website - many website owners place their email address on their website which is another way of saying "send me spam".
• Use a form to enable visitors to contact you via your website - clearly the form should not have your email address as a hidden field
• Have your email client set to send and receive in plain text.
• If an email address is already getting spammed it can't be fixed, use a new email address.
• Don't use addresses such as info@, orders@, john@ or other really obvious email addresses. Use something more complicated such as info23@.
• Don't subscribe to websites like astrology of the day - they will sell your email address.
• If you must subscribe to a website use a forwarder to forward to your real email address. Make the forwarder name similiar to the site you are subscribing to... then you know if they sold your email address. For instance use hardwareharry@ to sign up to hardwareharry.com and forward to your real email address. If you start getting spam addressed to hardwareharry@ you know that hardwareharry sold your email address. To fix simply delete the forwarder - no more spam.

If you use these tips then you don't need to enable server-side SPAM filters. SPAM filters have lots of false negatives and false positives - which means emails that are not SPAM are being deleted. The sole effect of the anti-spam industry is to make email a totally unreliable form of communication.

If you must filter spam use an email client with adaptive spam filter, it is way better to filter email at your PC rather than the server. Remember all filters make mistakes, so check that spam folder for mistakes every day.

Further Reading
Which Email Client
HTML or Plain Text