How to minimise your risk of getting spam
Most of us are familier with spam, what it is and hoow annoying it can be. Spam has reached epidemic proportions of late. In 2005, e-mail management company Postini announced that only 12% of all e-mail is legitimate! But there are ways to reduce our vulnerability to being spamed.
1) Guard your address carefully.
People often disclose their e-mail addresses without a second thought. However once your address is out, it's out for good. Think twice before giving out your e-mail address at shops. You may sign up for notices of special offers and sales, and, in turn, the store wants your e-mail. Most stores should have a privacy policy in place, but even e-mail you opted to receive starts to become spam if you receive too much.
2) Never use your email address on a webpage where the web form is not cloaked or encrypted.
This is one of the most often areas which make people vulnerable to spam. When people update content on thier websites and put their email address in the text or in a simple 'mail to' form. This allows web crawlers or 'spam bots' to harvest the email address an add it to thier lists. Always be sure when you want someone to contact you you use the cloaked contact form.
All messagepac sites have a fully cloaked contact form that can be customised to your requirements. Always add a link to /contactus/ (the contact form URL) in your text when you wish to point someone to mailing you.
3) Request your domain registrar filter the domain registration email for you.
If you have your own domain name this is a must! There is often an additional charge to the registrars or agents regular service (With digital forest domain registration we offer this service as standard!) Rather than use your email address, the registrar or agent can use a 'domains@registrardomain.com' email address which they then manage, passing on legitimate domain related mail to you. This is a valuable service because spammers use the domain registration database a lot becasue they know there are legitimate email addresses.
4) Use challenge and response tools to minimise your spam.
There are a number of services that allow you to set up a 'white list' of approved senders ( like your address book) anyone not in the list will be challenged to validate there email address the first time they send a mail to you. Most people speak highly of these systems when they sign up to them and it is the ownly way of seriously reducing spam on existing mail accounts. Companies such as http://www.vanquish.com/ or http://www.spamarrest.com can provide these services for a annual fee. Digital Forest offers these services as standard on all mail accounts.
For further information on the spam control features provided by Digital Forest Interactive please click here
Article Date: 2nd November 2006 |
