Stopping Spam

Your website design should look closely at how you handle your email address. If you place an email address on a web page without taking special precautions, spammers will steal it. They use automated programs called spambots which search websites looking for email addresses to add to their lists. It is not that they might lift the address, they will lift the address. Usually, it will not take long. If you are putting email addresses on the web, you must take precautions to prevent this, particularly if you are posting someone's address other than your own.

 

If you think, "That's okay, I have a spam filter," then you are in for a nasty surprise. Your filter will sometimes send real messages to your spam folder by mistake, and you will not see them. If you think you can just check your spam folder occasionally, can you really do that when you get hundreds or thousands of spam messages a day? And if you think it is alright because you are not currently getting that much spam....if your email address is on a web page, then someday you will.

 

Spam filters are not a solution, you have to prevent spam in the first place. And the first step is removing any plain address from the web right away.

 

There are a number of ways to hide your email address from spammers. Unfortunately each of them has a downside. Then again, spam is worse than the downside, so we accept the downside because it is better than surrendering our addresses to spammers.

 

In a perfect world, you could have all of the following on your web pages:

When you do something to keep spambots from stealing addresses from your web pages you will give up at least one of those features. It is the price of thwarting spambots, but it s a necessary price.

 

None of these things will prevent spam that you are already receiving. Once an address has been stolen by spammers there is no way to get them to "un-steal" it. Like so many things in life, if you wait until something becomes a problem, then often there's no easy solution.