A year ago I would receive, on average, 120 spam emails per day. Now I only receive about 20. That is about an 84% drop, for those who suck at math. To achieve this amazing result I did three simple actions on my web sites.
Got rid of mailto: links
This site used to be hosted on a free host that had no Perl or PHP capabilities. For whatever reason, when I got a better host I never removed my mailto: links and replaced them with contact forms. I finally did so, and the results were pretty amazing.
Just remember that if you do use a contact form, add in some protection so spammers cannot potentially use it for sending out spam. Or, to make it easier, just use a pre-made contact form.
No catch-all addresses
The vast majority of my websites have no catch-all addresses. A catch-all email address will “catch” any email that is sent to a nonexistent user. This can lower spam because by not having a catch-all account, because your server will send a “user not found” error to the spammer. A lot of spam software will not send spam to that account again if it is nonexistent.
Spam blockers
Well this is a big of an obvious tip, but many webmasters don’t have their spam blockers turned on. Most, if not all, web hosts these days automatically include some great blockers, which can be accessed in your site’s control panel.
Please subscribe, or else I will cry. Do you really want to make a programmer cry?
Leave a Reply