Five Ways to Avoid Getting Spam from Your Website

1. Never post your email address

Never allow your email address to appear on your website, or for that matter any website, such as a forum. The reason is that the web is crawling with cyber beasties called spiders, robots, or just bots. Many of these web crawlers have legitimate functions. Search engines, for example, use bots to search out websites and index their content so that when someone does a search in, for example, Yahoo! or another search engine a list of websites with relevant content is displayed.

Other bots are not so benign. Spambots will crawl web pages looking for any text that looks like an email address. If they find yours, you will be introduced to a steady stream fraudulent solicitations in your inbox. Why do we use the word 'fraudulent'? Because in the United States spam is a crime. Therefore, everyone engaging in spamming is by definition a criminal. Never respond to any spam message. You will only be confirming to the spammer that your email address is valid and mail is viewed regularly.

2. Do not encrypt your email address using javascript

Javascript encryption is not sufficient to protect your email address. There are about three popular javascripts that will encrypt an email address and provide a link that will open a visitor's email program with your email in the 'Send To:' field.

For a time, this was reasonably adequate protection since most bots don't interpret javascript; however, that is changing. Computer security is a constant process or strike and counterstrike. As more web designers began to use this method spambots got more sophisticated. Any spambot that can sniff out and execute the javascript can get access to your email address. An added disadvantage is that any legitimate site visitor that has javascript disabled in his or her browser will not be able to send you a message.

3. Use a contact form

So if you can't post your email address on your website how do visitors contact you? The answer is to use a secure contact form. With a contact form a visitor simply types a message into a form and clicks a button to submit it. Only your server knows your email address.

At PWS we are so committed to protecting your email address from spam that we include a free contact form in every website package.

4. Choose mailbox names that can't be guessed from your website content

Unfortunately, even a contact form will not give complete protection for spam. Even if a spambot can not find a email address on your site, it may still index your site just like a search engine would do. It will then try to guess email addresses for your domain using the information it finds on your website. For example, if it finds 'John Doe' mentioned on your website, it may try sending spam to doe@yourdomain.com, jdoe@yourdomain.com, john.doe@yourdomain.com, etc. Another example is standard mailboxes that businesses use like 'info', 'sales', or 'billing'. These are also easily guessed.

It is sometimes a compromise between using friendly, easy to remember mailbox names and names that spammers find hard to guess.

5. Use a separate domain or subdomain for email