Is Email Spam Getting You Down?
Email spam can be a huge nuisance to your website and email inbox. Luckily there are numerous ways to prevent spam from flooding your inbox and causing annoying issues.
This post was inspired by an incident that happened a few weeks ago. On our site, our contact form didn’t have any security-CAPTCHA technology installed to date. I know what you’re thinking, “why?” Well, we never had an issue in the past as most of the spam was caught in an email filter by the server so we rarely had issues.
Anyways, about 2 weeks ago at about 3:00am, I woke up to find my phone had over 2,000 spam emails sent through our contact form all from the same sender. 2,000 is not an exaggeration, so I was in my office at 3:00am installing a CAPTCHA form so this would never happen again.
Hope can you prevent lots of spam from hitting your website and email account?
- Have your web host install an email filter on the server. There are quite a few out there, but the most popular is called “Postini.” Postini is the main filter that Gmail uses which seems to work great. There are other ones like Spam Assassin, Spam Hammer, etc.
- If your contact forms on your site don’t have a CAPTCHA form, we suggest that you have one installed immediately.What is a “CAPTCHA” you may ask?
A CAPTCHA is an image-based security plugin for your contact form that requires anyone who submits an email to fill out a sequence of numbers and/or letters. This verification tool will usually ward off all of the automated spam bots as they aren’t usually humans.
So if you’re struggling with spam issues, be sure to contact your web host and ask them about these anti-spam measures.
Until Next Time,
Josh Olswanger
Thrive Web Designs – Your Boise Web Design Team
