Technology solution to slicing spam lags

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Practice Safe E-Mail

As an association meeting I was speaking at, I picked a person out of the the front row and asked her to assist me. She agreed. I then had her stand up and turn to the audience. She did. Then I asked her to tell everyone her home phone number. She didn't.
90% of the organizations that I deal with expose their business email addresses, and in most cases many of their employees email addresses, on their websites. Its the electronic equivalent of having someone write your home phone number on every washroom wall on the planet.
The 2nd most frequently employed way for a SPAMMER to collect a valid email address is to harvest the HTML text using any one of a number of efficient and free crawlers.
So my rules of thumb to eliminate SPAM at business addresses are:
1. Hide your email address preferably behind a mail form. Then change the address.
2. Use a different response-address when answering business mail. Within the body of the response, tell customers/clients/associates to respond to the message through your Contact-Us page.
3. Monitor SPAM to Employee email addresses and educate high-volume victims about the danger of inappropriate disclosure of email addresses.
4. Defend the corporate email address books with all diligence.
5. If the business needs to 'brand' its email, use the URL of the Contact Us page not the email address.
Most exposed corporate addresses that I've reviewed seem to attract 75-100 spam/day (I'm not sure why? any ideas). Protecting the address usually reduces that to under 5.
This isn't the answer to the SPAM problem. There won't be a real answer until SMTP is fixed but its something that every business can do right now.

Posted by: Canada Dan   Posted on: 03/23/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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