We all get spam, and we all hate it. I always thought it would be great if I could open some spam, press a button on my computer and have a zillion volts of electricity shoot through
phone lines all way to computer that sent spam and turn it into a smoldering pile of metal and plastic.Before I made a few changes I used to get about 2,500 spam EVERY DAY! Now I only get about 250. Still a lot, but only 10% of what I used to get.
Learning how to do this for your own website, and your clients' websites, will make you a hero in everyone's eyes.
So let's talk about some of things you can do to cut back on your spam.
One of things I did to reduce my spam was to remove "Catch All" setting on my web hosting company. A "Catch All" does just that. It catches all e-mail sent to your domain name, in my case that would be Anything@CreativeCauldron.com, which would include JeffColburn@CreativeCauldron.com, Giggles@CreativeCauldron.com, PinkElephants@CreativeCauldron.com and so on. Any e-mail address that ended with @CreativeCauldron.com was grabbed by my hosting company's e-mail program and sent to me.
When you remove "Catch All," you need to tell e-mail program what e-mail addresses to send to you. Many people just use Info@DomainName.com. You can add more whenever you want, but more e-mail address you have more spam you will receive. No longer receiving 2,250 e-mails a day really helped my sanity and reduced my stress levels.
To reduce my spam even more, I set up filters in my e-mail program. These filters automatically move any e-mails into delete folder that meet criteria I set. I can then quickly scan this folder to see if something wound up in there that I really want to read. Some of words I set up in filters include various body parts, mortgage, meds, and other similar words. I actually have over 50 words in filters, with new ones being added all time. Be careful what you use for filters though. Maybe you've been getting spam about growing some part of your body. You could put "grow" in a filter, but if you run a gardening website you may have people sending you legitimate e-mails about growing plants. With "grow" as one of your filters, then these legitimate e-mails would go to your delete folder. Along these same lines, many filters will prevent you from receiving ezines you have subscribed to, some kind of ads you want and more. So be careful.
You can also use forms on your website to let people contact you. Just create a form where person can put in their name, e-mail address and a short message. They click on Send button and off it goes. The software that harvests e-mail addresses can't get your e-mail address from form. At least, not yet. To make your form more secure you can use NateMail at http://www.mindpalette.com/formprocessing/index.php to process your form. There's a free version and a paid ($15) version.
