Our spam filtering service homepage, www.spamarrest.com, informs us that electronic spam has been around for 30 years this month. A few years ago, spam wasn't a common problem but now it has soared to become part of our electronic mass communication, a seeming unstoppable torrent that we have to put up with ... until now.

The usual measures that people employ include anti-spam software and spam flitering services. The drawbacks though are that -
      1) once you are on a spamming list you can never remove yourself from it, and
      2) it's tedious having to go through your spam box, just to see if any legitimate emails are there.

The obvious answer is to ensure that your email address never makes it to any spammer's list. Here is a strategy that will help.

Get a new address - and protect it

1) Sign up for a GoogleMail account at www.google.co.uk/ or whatever Google URL matches your country.
2) Now you need to cloak that email address. That means you go to one of the free disposable email address sites, such as www.spamgourmet.com, and create an account. You will receive an email from them to validate that account before you can go further. 
3) Now you can create any number of disposable addresses to protect your GoogleMail address, ensuring that each one contains a validating word that you supply. So, I might create a disposable address such as nospam.santari@spamgourmet.com where 'nospam' is my chosen validating word.
4) Use these disposable addresses in any place you would normally use your original address, e.g. blogs, signing up for mailing lists, on websites, wherever these addresses may be publicly seen. You might choose one disposable address for mailing lists and another for your blog, so that you can identify the source of any spam. 
5) If any spam, associated with a disposable address, starts to come through then you can easily delete that disposable address - AND THE SPAM STOPS.
6) If any of your disposable addresses are given to reliable 3rd parties, such as a friend's mailing list, then you can make that disposable address become permanent (Trusted Senders option).
7) There are other advanced features available, such as 'Reply Address Masking'. If you reply to an email then this option ensures that the reply goes through SpamGourmet and protects your original address from being revealed.

I recommend the use of a disposable email address service. Protection is better than ....

Be contactable - but do not show yourself

For years it was safe to clearly display an email address on a website. Then the spam avalanche required people to be more wary about disguising email addresses. There are several clever ways to encode addresses but the simple facts are that -
1) if an address can be viewed on a page then it can be added to a spam list
2) if an address can be encoded, then a spammer can produce software that does the decoding.

The simple answer here is to use a form designed for a specific purpose, such as a booking form, an enquiry form, a mailing list subscription form, etc. There is no need to display your email address as any details entered on the form will be collected, validated and forwarded to you - depending on the form providing service you use.

It's useful if you know how to design and validate forms. If you don't then here are some suggestions:-

http://formsmarts.com/form-spam
No first-hand experience but they provide a detailed explanation of their services, they are free, and provide a sophisticated "form spam protection platform" that deserves trialling.

http://www.willmaster.com/software/commercial/webform/
I have used software from this company before that is well thought out, functional and extremely reliable. You use their on-line software to generate a form that is hijack-proof and anti-spam proof. They collect the information from your form, process it, and send it on to you. This service costs $3.97 per month paid monthly or $2.97 per month if paid yearly. The subscription provides one In-Form™ form that you can put on as many web pages on as may web sites as you want (so long as you own the web sites).

You get the idea, I hope, that there are many competing services that can give you more than the ordinary anti-spam option. But, before you rush off to protect your existing forms (or get ready to create new spam-proofed ones), I'd like to discuss another strategy ...  this one is about the hijack-proofing of your website.

Share this article: