Spam Prevention

Spam, or unsolicited commercial e-mail as it is more formally known, is now a continual annoyance to most that use the internet regularly. For those making their living online the problems caused by spam go beyond simple irritation and can actually encroach on the business itself as more time is spent dealing with it and the possibility of loosing genuine enquiries increases.

With the problem increasing, despite recent regulatory changes, an online merchant could be forgiven for thinking that there is little they can do to stop the problem. In some ways they are right. Completely stopping spam is not an easy process, but the good news is that you can dramatically decrease it and reduce its impact on your business without too much difficulty.

Prevention is better than cure

If you are already receiving a lot of spam, then unfortunately the job of reducing the problem is harder. Once spammers have an email address it will often circulate very quickly to other spammers, resulting in more and more spam.

If this is the case you may want to consider changing the main email address that you use. If, for example, most of the spam you get is sent to info@(youraddress), you may want to start using enquiries@ as your main point of contact. If you take this approach be sure not to just cancel the old address, as past customers may have it on record. Instead ask your webmaster or host to set up an automatic response that sends anyone making an enquiry gets directed to a page with updated contact details.

Hide your address from spammers

The best way to avoid the problem of spam is to ensure that spammers don’t get your email address in the first place. A large proportion of email addresses that are used by spammers are found by automatically searching websites for them using automated programs called spiders. This unfortunately means that as your marketing efforts increase the visibility of your website you are more likely to get spam to the addresses on the site.

Many sites no longer show an email address as part of the contact details, instead replacing it with a contact/feedback form. This can be a very cheap and effective way of hiding the address from address harvesting spiders. If you are using a contact form ensure that the email address is not still visible in the source code of the page as the spiders will still be able to find it. This is a very common mistake. You can check this by viewing the page in Internet Explorer and selecting VIEW then SOURCE and looking for the email address in the resulting code.

A similar approach is to use JavaScript to write the email address on the page. This has the advantage of being seamless to most web users, but is not as safe as using a contact form.

Take on multiple identities

Most of us give out our email addresses for various purposes many times each week, and we cannot always control who ends up with them. Using different email addresses for different purposes is a good way of spreading the risk.

For instance, the email address that you use in offline advertising, on your business cards and letterheads needs to be kept as spam free as possible. A large proportion of people contacting you from this address will not be known to you, so you want to be sure that there is no chance of losing genuine enquiries amongst the morning’s flood of Viagra offers.

If you are using contact forms that don’t show the email address then another address can be used for these. As this address has never been published anywhere, you can be pretty certain that any mail received through it is not a bulk announcement.

Use a separate address (or even addresses) for the various forums and sites that you join. The more this address is circulated then the more likely it is to attract spam, which is not too much of a problem if the address is not being used for anything vital. You can after all always cancel the account if it gets really out of hand.

Challenging spammers

One very effective way to drastically reduce spam if you already have it is to sign up for one of the many challenge/response anti-spam services. These services sit between you and your email and require that anyone who sends you mail and is not recognised by the system manually confirm the email in a way that the automated mailers used by spammers couldn’t.

Although very effective at stopping spam, challenge response systems are rarely seen as a good choice for online merchants. After all, do you really want to put obstacles up in front of potential customers?

Filtering out the junk

Another approach to dealing with spam is to filter it out, either before it reaches you inbox or once it arrives. There are various solutions that either get installed on your computer or sit on the server that use complex algorithms to try to identify spam. When the systems identify a possible spam they can usually be set-up to either mark it as spam or automatically delete the message.

The major potential downfall of systems like this for the online merchant is the danger of “false positive”, real enquiries that are incorrectly identified as spam. These systems generally rely strongly on the use of a white list of known addresses which would simply not be accurate for anyone hoping to generate fresh enquiries from unknown individuals.

Combining forces

Where systems like spam filters can be invaluable to the online merchant is where separate addresses are being used in the way described above. The filter program can be configured to allow all mail to pass unmolested from clean sources like our contact form, and to intercept possible spam only from the less vital addresses. This way the addresses that are likely to receive spam will be filtered and the likelihood of missing out of a real enquiry is reduced almost to zero.

Whatever approach you take to fighting spam, it is important to bear in mind that none are foolproof. For an online merchant it is usually more important to avoid potential false positives than it is to catch every unsolicited mail.

- 10th September 2004

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