Anti-Spam Techniques and Spam Prevention Advice

This page contains our general guidelines and advice regarding spam prevention and an explanation of how spam works. Currently the amount of "spam" being transmitted grows at an approximate rate of 100% per year, we could be facing a very tedious year!

What is "Spam"?
FACT: Approximately 67% of all transmitted email messages are unwanted or "spam".

Spam is the general term for incoming emails that are sent to your account without your prior consent. Generally these emails are illegitimate business proposals, medicinal drug offers and often offensive materials being sold or displayed by various means over the Internet. Some of these messages could also contain virus programs or even appear to come from legitimate sources, such as Banks.Such messages will ask you to complete a registration or enter a password (or similar) and are known as "Phishing" - their only purpose being to acquire personal data or even passwords to your accounts so they can commit fraud.

Sometimes I receive "bounce" messages from unrecognised email addresses:
FACT: More than 90% of all spam has a falsified (fake) return address causing mis-directed bounce problems.

You may receive bounce messages from time to time stating that you have supposedly sent an email with a virus attachment - or you have sent unwanted emails (spam) - or the recipient reported is unknown to you (you didn't send it). This happens when spammers are falsifying the headers of the emails they send out (the header is the technical part of an email that Identifies who the sender is and what time it was sent etc.). Spammers randomly select from their own lists which email address will be used to send the next 1,000 or 1,000,000 emails. This can be restricted by your ISP, or us (if you host with us) using a technique call SPF (Sender Policy Framework) - Ask your ISP about SPF.

How is my email address being found?

Most spam systems send out what is called a robot or spider (much like the search engine equivalent) which "harvests" any email addresses visible on your company web pages. Alternatively so-called "hackers" break in to existing subscribed email lists, often newsletters or industry publications and steal the client / email lists. Some Spam companies will simply collect as many website addresses from the Internet and simply guess some of the generic email addresses that may be in use, like: info@, sales@, & enquiries@yourdomain.co.uk.

Spam Prevention Methods / Spam Reduction Methods:

Never use the "reply or remove" option at the bottom of spam messages, some spammers might remove your address but often they will flag your email address as being current and in use - sending you more spam or even pass your address on to other spammers.

Buy anti-spam software from Kaspersky Anti-Spam software (there are many other vendors). This software installs and runs very easily on your PC or laptop and should filter out any unwanted emails, it works by recognising patterns in the structure of emails received and frequent updates help the software to recognise known spamming email senders.

Method 1

Install a "server side" industrial strength anti-spam system on your webserver or hosting server. This is available from Clientel Systems or most other good hosting providers as an additional service to your existing web hosting services . It works in much the same way as the spam prevention software from Kaspersky Anti-Spam but does not run on your PC or laptop (it runs on your webserver), therefore allowing your PC / laptop to run quicker in many cases. Click the image to view their website:

Method 2

Avoid using "catch all" or "generic" email accounts. Often if you specify which exact email addresses can be used you will reduce spam that targets a range of email addresses at a known website address (domain) i.e. if you only use "sales@yourdomain.co.uk" then all emails addressed to "enquiries@yourdomain.co.uk" will bounce straight back to the spam sender!

Method 3

Hide your email address from your website. Ensure that your email addresses are not unecessarily exposed on your homepage and contact forms. This can be done by using the latest secure "form to email" software (perl scripts, asp or php scripts) for your enquiry forms on your website. Also you can change all listed email addresses so that the email links to your email address but pre-fix the email address with ".pleasedelete " - this way genuine potential contacts should recognise to delete the first part of the email address before sending an email. This technique will slow down and hopefully prevent email "harvesters" from gaining your email addresses from your website.

Please contact us for more information about spam prevention, anti-spam techniques or our web hosting services using our contact form .

We also recommend use of Kaspersky Anti-virus protection software, click here for more information .