Why should you guard your email address? Most people know when you see an email address that the text is blue and underlined, you can simply click it and your default email program (like Outlook Express, Yahoo, or Thunderbird) will open up with a way for you to immediately write that person. When you display your email address to the public that way, you are welcoming a lot of trouble, like being spammed.
Every day there are computers designed to scan the Internet for information. Many are for good, and others for bad. Some that are good do not discriminate on the information retrieved by the computer robots/ spiders / programs. This information can be many things like people, things, amounts, and much more, but even more so, a lot of computers are designed to acquire email addresses.
This is called email harvesting. It is much like companies who pay good money to get people to gather phone numbers so telemarketing companies can call you in the most inconvenient times at their most opportune time. When these computers have harvested emails each day, they are sent automatically to a program that has a template email pre-made from the company behind that computer, sometimes even several, or several hundred different templates. They plug the emails in two different ways. They either plug it in individually- again the computer does this so this whole process has nothing to do with humans emailing you. The other way is mass email. This is spamming. Well, both ways are as the simple definition accepted for the term “spam” is unwanted, off topic, solicited material.
So, when you sign up for some items, your email might be sent out to third party computers/ companies. In return, your email goes from getting the one email that you wanted to several emails that you did not want. Some individuals will open their email inbox and find hundreds of emails they never wanted.
The even more pathetic thing is that if some of those emails offer you a way to sign up to get off their mailing list, you will be taken off theirs, BUT you will find that you have sadly gotten sucked even further into the spam system. Despite the Spam Act of 2002, which was suppose to protect users online from this horrendous and seemingly unending cycle, people are still having problems with being spammed.
Some of the spam emails are quite tricky. Some include your name in the subject, making you, the user think that these people somehow either know you or they trick you to think that there really is a real person out their emailing. There are real people that do get paid to send mass email, but because of the easy email harvesting, that is even becoming obsolete.
Here are some suggestions in trying to prevent from your information being harvested, even your email.
1. Do not hyperlink your email address. If you must, put NO SPAM within your actual email address or type out the AT and the DOT in your email address. This makes it a little tougher for spammers to filch your email address from your web site.
2. It is far more recommended to not reveal your email address at all. Use a secure contact email form or one that has captcha. For WordPress users there are plenty. I actually use Dagon Design Formmailer (they even have a stand alone php version) for my contact forms because they have captcha.
3. Do not sign up for things that ask you to sign up just to get something back, even if it seems fun. It will not be fun when you keep getting email because you signed up for hundreds of things because it was free. Free should should mean without expecting anything in return.
4. Do not reply to spam mail. Block it or report it if you can.
5. Use a spam filter for your email inbox. Most filters allow you to put in keywords that you usually see in spam so you can reduce it. This will not eliminate the problem, but it certainly can reduce what you see coming into your email inbox.
6. Sign up for some type of email security that will not deliver mail unless the sender has to verify that they are a real person. There are plenty out there that are free.
7. Do not open emails that you do not recognize. It is either spam or it could even be a virus. Viruses can be attached through the code in email as well as any attachments.
8. If you do open spam mail, do not click on the link to take yourself off their mailing list. As mentioned, you will not succeed, and only make the problem worse.
9. If you do sign up for something, make sure that the site says that they do not share your information with third parties. This would be like a visual contract and the company could be reported easily.
10. Always, if you are not sure of something, simply do not even open the email, or even the site in question.
11. Remind your usual email friends to remember to put a valid subject. This will prevent their email from being thrown into the spam or junk mail.
12. Make sure your password is not easy to figure out. You might have to write it down somewhere, but it is better to do that then risk being hacked.
Have any other advice? What services do you recommend for people wanting to prevent spam?
For my contact form I embed a Google Doc contact form, you don't need to install any plug-ins which adds overhead to your wordpress site and its easy to embed the same contact form in multiple places just by cutting and pasting the iFrame code and they all update the same doc which is neat. The only con is you don't get an email with the contact and have to actually check the Google doc.
The other thing I do is combine the Akismet plug-in for wordpress with WP-SpamFree, this has reduced 90% of my comment spam over the past three months and is an ideal combination.
I tend to stay away from anything that will put in an iframe in my site. I know a lot of people like that. The dagon design is pretty light and uses little space. However, it does have the option that if you want to collect data through emails and put it into a spreadsheet, you can. I do not do that.
I heard WP-SpamFree was nice. Interested in doing a guest post for WPAddict.net about that plugin???
You are right about spamming the issue face here is that most of my time i get spam comments i wrote two post about spammers and at one point i had a specific site that send about twenty spam comment daily to my site so i cut and paste them back on their site and they stopped.