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Fighting the Good Fight Over Spam

Created by: Rich Hudson, Information Technology, San Diego, CA

Date: Sep 27, 2007, Number of Replies: 1

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I've received about a thousand notices of email
failures in the last hour... I've filtered all of it so it goes to
Junk or Trash (Eudora user) right now. What else can I do?

Judith:

Get a cup of coffee this is a long post.

Go into your domain-hosting panel. The catch all e-mail Margery talked about is called the drop box disable that first.

Remove the mail to links in your signature files that you use here on Real Talk and other blogs and public sites. (just take out the mail to part) If people want to contact you they can cut and past the address into the e-mail. Especially important if you have a blog from one of the popular bloging hosts. They seem to be prime targets these days.

Make sure any forms on your site are secure forms. I can provide more specific info on this if you need it contact me off list.

Protect your e-mail address on your domain. Spammers use spiders to crawl site and harvest e-mail addresses. Spammers want easy prey so they are looking most often for the @ symbol in an e-mail address in the source code of your site. To prevent your site from becoming easy prey, use this code generator program that I use. Just enter you e-mail into the box and cut and paste the generated code into your web page here is the link http://www.diplo.co.uk/design/encode.php

Talk to your domain host about adding SPF to your domain. SPF (Sender Policy Framework) this is a record with a special syntax that lists which hosts are allowed to send mail from the domain. Read more about this at http://www.openspf.org/ you can create records here for your domain. SPF is not nirvana and it does cause some problems but support is available at open SPF.

If you need help with any of this contact me off list and I will be glad to help.

Good luck and keep us posted on your progress.
Caryn D. Webb ePRO Realtor® , Hillsborough NJ
CD WEBB DESIGN
Web, Print, Multimedia Marketing
and Administrative Services Designed for Real Estate
Web: http://CDWebbDesign.com
E-mail: Caryn@CDWebbDesign.com

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Paula Bean Licensed Real Estate Agent, Orlando, FL

Date: Aug 23

I'll add to this post. Mike Barnett recently had a post regarding junk and spam email, here are my thoughts on the matter:

I will copy this msg t the email heaven section as well.

Here is what I do. Turn off junk filtering. I got a great Spam folder called cloudmark which has a learning curve, but once you are done with that, pretty much you get what you want in your folders.

I create rules for EVERTHING, so, pretty much what comes into my inbox is either junk, which goes to cloudmark, OR, it could be a lead from my web site.

Each morning I look at my inbox. If there is a good email in there, I whitelist it.

Then I go to my folders to see the stuff I really want.

This is like the Staples 'easy button'. If you create rules for email to go to a certain folder, then pretty much most of your inbox is spam.

Makes my life easier ;-)

Additionally if you stop using your email address in your sig lines and these blogs, web sites and list serves, that will work wonders as well. I use Realping. Scammers can't fix this... if you want to put your email address in your sig line or web site make it say something like PaulaBean (space)at homeorlando.com, or you can also make a .jpg of your email address, spammers can't reach this either (as far as I know, Mike Barnet may have input here) but if you take your photo program and put your email address in a .jpg format, it make it harder for them to strip your address, thus, less spam

I would highly recommend using RT's emailPlus program as they can help you with this. I used to get about 3000 emails a day, of which 80% were spam. RT has great servers and Spam filters in place and excellent customer service...now I'm down to a couple hundred spams a day of which only a few are truly spam.

Saves me a LOT OF TIME. Call them to inquire about their email programs... you'll be glad you did and not only THAT - if you have an issue, they have excellent customer service 24/7. Try getting that with someone when your email is down and you can't speak a foreign language. Aloha, OLA, Kanishiwa?

Paula Bean
Orlando, F

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