How To Can Spam :: Spam Prevention Techniques
April 6th, 2007 by 
Chris Pangburn
One of the major productivity-harming features of email is ‘spam’ – basically unsolicited bulk email that comes in a variety of forms on a scale of just annoying to downright disgusting. Unfortunately in this day and age it seems that no matter how well you hide your email address from spammers, over time you will likely be receiving a large number of spam emails. Most businesses also list their email address on their website, which is a sure-fire way to increase your spam by an exponential amount! Prevention is better than cure…
Once the spammers have your email address there’s nothing you can do about it, but sometimes prevention is better than cure… If you list your email address on your website then make sure you have run it through an Email Obfuscator Script. This is an online tool where you enter your email address and it returns an encoded version that is visible to human eyes, but the automatic bots that the spammers use has trouble reading it. Unfortunately it isn’t foolproof, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction. Once you have the encoded email address, you need to enter this into the code for your web page. If you had your website designed by us then we normally ‘ofbuscate’ all email addresses before publishing them on a website, however just contact us for a quote if you want us to do it for you.
Another method of reducing spam is to replace the text version of your email address with an image. For this you need an image editor to create a blank image with the background colour of your website, and then type the email address into the image, and insert this into the code for the web page. Most spam-bots can’t read images so this should help prevent the majority of the unsolicited bulk emails.
A couple of tricks of the trade are to try and avoid using common email addresses if possible such as info@… sales@… etc. as these are also randomly targeted.
Finally for some light-hearted vengeance (if that’s not a contradiction in terms), take a look at an example of a Spam Trap that has been created to randomly generate fake email addresses on a page whenever it is loaded and confuse the bot into harvesting thousands of fake email addresses.
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