Published on 06.24.08

Unsolicited Commerical Email (UCE), more commonly known as spam, is an evil that almost every website owner has become grudgingly accustomed to dealing with.

As with poison ivy or girl cooties, the best cure for UCE is prevention. Sadly, once your email address has been added to spammers' databases, there is no removing it. A lot has been written on this subject,so rather than regurgitate it all, we will focus on email links on your website and what you can do to protect them.

Unsolicited Commerical Email (UCE), more commonly known as spam, is an evil that almost every website owner has become grudgingly accustomed to dealing with.

So how does a website owner make their contact information available for visitors, without malicious users adding it to a database for the next trendy scam? The simple, unfortunate answer is that you cannot; but you can limit your exposure by using these good practices:

Guard your email address as you would your firstborn child -- The first rule of thumb is to keep your private email address private. Don't use it when you order items online, sign up for newsletters, or post it publicly on any websites (including your own--more on that later). Use a "throw away" email such as hotmail or a forwarding account (available from Hurtdidit).

Encode email links on your website -- If you must have your email address available on a website (such as your own so visitors can contact you), then make sure it is encoded in a manner such that spam harvesters cannot readily pick it up. The techno-geek term for this is called "munging" and consists of converting your email link to a set of random numbers, which are meaningless to the harvesters.

Use a different email address for public use -- and a different address for private use. These can be set up as forwarders or full-fledged, separate email accounts. For my own address, I have a single email account that clients and friends can use, and a separate one for prospects or "unknown" contacts.

Use spam filtering software -- We use SpamAssassin, which is a server-based solution that helps weed out the wheat from the chaff. Naughty-looking emails are flagged as "Possible Spam" when they arrive in Outlook, and an email rule can easily be set up to redirect those messages to a folder other than the inbox, where you can review and discard the bad messages. This isn't 100% fool-proof, but does keep the lion's share of the bad stuff from overloading a person's inbox.

Is your website optimized to foil the spam harvesters? Contact Hurtdidit today for a free website assessment.