Stop the SPAM!

Not just a mystery meat any more.
Spam. Just the name conjures up images of products you don’t need, designer pharmaceuticals, and questionable investment strategies, not to mention a mystery meat product made popular in the 50’s. Email is an ever increasing part of our business and personal lives, and Spam has gone from being a minor speed bump to a major road block to progress. Here are some tips to lessen the amount of Spam you receive, and to perhaps safeguard some of your email addresses.

Catch-all email addresses
ValueWeb email allows you to designate a mailbox as a "catch-all." This means that you not only receive mail for valid email addresses that you create, such as info@yourdomain.com and sales@yourdomain.com, but also for addresses that you did not create, such as johndoe@domain.com. As a result, catch-all mailboxes tend to get filled with a lot of spam. Any malicious spammer can send mail to anything at your domain — anynamehere@yourdomain.com — and it will arrive in your catch-all mailbox. Not only is this a nuisance but it puts undue strain on the entire mail system. By disabling this feature, you will reduce the amount of spam you receive and help make our mail system more efficient.

You don’t use a catch-all email address and you still get spam?
Have you ever wondered how spammers get your actual email address? One tool they use is called a spider, which scours legitimate sites for email addresses. The spider then returns to the gatherer with lists of addresses which are either used for, or sold for mass marketing.

How can you prevent this?
There are a couple of tricks you might find easy enough to implement:

• Create a graphic of your email address text and place it into the code of your page, positioning it where you want it. This is one of the best and easiest solutions.
• You can substitute the ASCII character code "&#64" for the "@" sign in your HTML code, as that will often fool the spiders and still display correctly in the browser.
• From a slightly more technical approach, there are also some scripting entries you can make on your site that will hide the email address. You can use a search engine to find scripting modifications that will work to hide your email address.

Spam is an ever increasing and challenging problem for everyone in the Internet field. As we do our part to block and mitigate Spam as much as possible, we will keep you posted. And we’ll continue to provide tips so you can help yourself by taking a proactive approach to the problem!