Comments on: How To Reduce Your Email Spam by 75%

By: Jan

Jan — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 23:23:51 +0000

I wish I had read this before we got heaps of spam after initially setting up our website! Surprisingly our web developers didn’t have encoding of email addresses as standard practice (they do now).

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By: Econoprint Blog » Blog Archive » Receive Less Spam

Econoprint Blog » Blog Archive » Receive Less Spam — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 21:17:41 +0000

[...] Be careful where you post your email address. Posting your email address on a website leaves it subject to be picked up by spammer email scraping programs. If you are going to list your email address on a website, ask your web programmer to encode your email address. This is a simple step that greatly reduces spam. Here is a link to a very detailed and technical article on how to encode your email address: http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/519/how-to-reduce-your-email-spam-by-75/. [...]

By: Reduce the spam received in your e-mail box at 12 Web Notes

Reduce the spam received in your e-mail box at 12 Web Notes — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 16:37:58 +0000

[...] on how to reduce the spam level posted by Yaro Starak at Entrepreneurs Journey. The article name is How To Reduce Your Email Spam by 75% and it gives an example how the authour of the post achieved such [...]

By: Yaro

Yaro — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 03:21:06 +0000

Juli – There’s always a risk. For example if one of your autoresponder subscribers decides to publish your email newsletter including your email address then it goes on to the web for any spammer to get it.

I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the fact that every so often I need to switch to a new email address.

Although lots of people are using gmail with good results thanks to the spam filters Google has.

Yaro

By: Juli

Juli — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 06:35:27 +0000

This is fantastic, helpful information. I started my main site over a decade ago and didn’t know any better: plastered my email everywhere. Plus I used to use it in Usenet posts. Good grief. I’m up to several hundred spams a day now and the spammers always seem a step ahead of any filtering programs.

I’ve been using a jpg file lately, but it’s too late. I’m on the lists.

Now I just need to figure out a new email address and get started.

Is there any risk in sending auto responses with my new email address, that one of those responses might actually reach a spammer and get myself back on their lists?

By: TonyG

TonyG — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 22:53:57 +0000

If spammers want your email badly enough, there is little you can do to stop them. If you still think you can, you don’t read widely enough. Spam bots are common as mud and can be confused. But even spam bots are getting smarter and can now read HEX and other encoding. Real spammers now use screen scrapers, so any email address visible in the browse can be detected and saved. Dedicated spammers (making BIG money) are also using HUMANS to read the pages and enter any email addresses they find. So if this is a war, we’re now really in the heat of the battle.

Forms and ‘bot-testers’ are still good ways to deter spammers from getting your email addresses (provided the address is not in the form code), but they are very bad for business. You are relying on people being able to enter their email address without any errors. Perhaps you force users to verify their email twice? When I see that, I copy and paste.

Personally, I like to make it as simple as possible for people to do business with me.

So, is there a solution? At this stage, I don’t think there is anything 100% foolproof. Strangely, my primary email which has been around now for 11 years and used all over the place on web pages, receives less spam now than my Yahoo address, which is only used to subscribe to lists and is never published on a web page. And my brand new ISP email address, which I don’t even use, is already getting spammed. But, that said, I have 8 email addresses and only get 7-8 spam messages per day. So that’s not too bad.

But that won’t stop me from looking for new ideas to frustrate the spammers. What I am really looking for is a way to send them 1000 emails for every one they send me. Any suggestions?

By: HART (1-800-HART)

HART (1-800-HART) — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 06:18:40 +0000

Some interesting thoughts here Yaro. I’ve been averaging between 400-500 emails per day. Fortunately, with my Spamnix addon to Eudora and the filters I’ve got setup. Most spam gets filtered correctly to the Junk Folder before I trash it. I’ve been using my hart (at) various domains (dot) com for years .. but I’ve been thinking of mixing it up a little and reducing the inbound.

I recently went away for a week and came back to 3300 emails … about 100 were legit that required a response .. 300 were blogging related that took time to deal with (replies, spam, etc)… and the rest were spam – except for 2 fax-to-emails I received .. and I had to wait to download everything FIRST before I can receive and print them = it took me the afternoon to do that. During the day, I usually have my email up and running and checking every 2 minutes so it doesn’t build up.

By: James Thoenes

James Thoenes — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 04:14:58 +0000

Thanks Yaro,
Like you said, anything that reduces spam is worth it.
james

By: Corby Simpson

Corby Simpson — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 01:04:15 +0000

A script at http://www.hidemyemail.ca has worked flawlessly for me for years. 100% Spam free and it’s easy as pie to add a “real” email link to a website, blog or whatever!

By: Alexander Kintis

Alexander Kintis — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 05:03:45 +0000

Another great tool is spam assassin; Google for it…

On our servers, it tags the e-mail with a message saying that it is possible spam — based off many algorithms. After that, you just use your e-mail client to filter your e-mail and find the messages that have been tagged.

From my experience, probably one of the best ways.

Hope that helps.

By: Yaro

Yaro — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 09:27:31 +0000

Hey Mr (or Mrs) Google Success – Using forms is definitely good advice, not just because of spam problems – also so you can capture lead information. However in my case there are some instances were I have to use an email for simplicity sake since my audience has trouble with English – following even the most basic instructions can be beyond them. The same can be said for using a graphic image for an email address – my clients would make a typo typing the email address in. Also, some people, definitely a very small minority, browse with images turned off – the same goes for javascript being switched off.

I think one of my biggest problems is email spoofing – I get a lot of bounce messages back to my addresses.

Each step forward against spam is a good one though so thanks for your advice.

By: Google Success

Google Success — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 08:04:39 +0000

I went through your comments and I was little amused reading about them. I am administering five online business websites each one of getting more than 1500 unique customers. However, the spam mails are less than 20.

My secret is very simple. All the queries, and ordrs on my websites are through forms. So my email address is never displayed. If there is need to display email address, I display it as an image. There are also simple javascript solutions to display email addresses which do not get spidered by the email harvester robots.

By: Jameses

Jameses — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 03:03:53 +0000

I noticed a simple technique elsewhere whereby the email address was placed as a .jpg or .gif file on the webpage. That way human users could easily identify the email address, whereas (I assume) bots would pass it over untouched. The only problem I can see arising is that people can’t cut and paste it into their address bar. As long as you kept your email addresses simple, it should be fine though…right?

By: CommerceCubes » Spam, Spam, Spam!

CommerceCubes » Spam, Spam, Spam! — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 18:15:03 +0000

[...] Yaro Starak of Entrepreneur’s Journey and BetterEdit fame recently posted an article about reducing spam that i personally think is something many small business owners and self employed people who use the internet as a ‘face’ for their business, encounter. [...]

By: Reducing Spam

Reducing Spam — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 13:24:31 +0000

Yaro,
I wrote an article about how to use simple AJAX to hide email addresses. As with the method you’ve outlined, it’s not unbeatable… but it should cut out 99% of the bot ‘scraping’.

http://15daysofjquery.com/safer-mailto-links/8/

Jack

By: Web Brander

Web Brander — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 11:46:13 +0000

I have got to try some of these methods, does that email address encoding work? There is a junk email spam function in microsoft outlook that gets rid of a lot of my spam.

By: Paul

Paul — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 10:10:50 +0000

The other problem with catch-all addresses is that spammers will dictionary bomb word@example.org (e.g. paul@example.org, news@example.org) to see if they can find anyone with that address. I used to get an awful lot of those before I turned off the catch-all feature on some of my domains.

By: Oli Allen

Oli Allen — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 09:01:53 +0000

Not to be too negative, but a common email address such as contact@ is likely to get a lot of spam, just as your admin@ address did. (I get a lot of spam to addresses like webmaster@, help@, contact@, sales@ etc which have never existed anywhere)

As you said, encoding your email address probably won’t help all that much – all it takes is one spammer with a bot clever enough to decode it and it’s all for nothing. If a browser can display something, there’s no reason to expect that a spam bot couldn’t.

By: Adnan

Adnan — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 08:42:51 +0000

Well done Yaro.
I also posted about my ridiculous amount of Spam yesterday. Although mine’s nowhere as bad as yours, Im getting about 20-30 spam comments a day. Thankfully Akismet works pretty well (apart from the odd one or two comments) so I don’t have to do any work. But the spamming still gets on my nerves!