Webmaster Articles > Stop Getting Spam
Learn how to minimize the amount of spam that you get.
Are you getting too much spam We all are, but if youre a webmaster the word spam takes on a whole new meaning.
It’s not uncommon for the luckiest of email users to receive a dozen or so spam messages each day, while those of us who aren’t so fortunate receive hundreds.
The casual home user tends to be more fortunate, so this article is devoted to those of us with one or more website because webmasters are getting hit by spam … and hit hard.
The reason … a website doesn’t do you much good if you don’t give potential customers a way to contact you, and that normally means posting an email address on your website, where it is vulnerable to email address harvesting tools used by spammers. Domain registration records are also a common source used by spammers.
In order to conduct business online you now need to sift through the endless barrage of offers for herbal viagra, pornography, pyramid schemes, and so on.
With such a large volume of spam to contend with, it’s likely you’ve lost sales due to missing important emails that simply floated away in this sea of spam. And theres no way to really calculate the cost of that lost business. If youve missed email then how can you ever know how much business youve lost
If you want to solve the problem, you need to be proactive because the sad reality is that if you do nothing, it will only get worse until finally it reaches the point where your email account has become totally and completely unmanageable. Fortunately there are a few options available to you.
Securing Your Domain Registration Against Spammers
First lets address the whois database, which is a publicly accessible database in which your domain registration record is listed … and that includes your email address. Its not uncommon now for people to be spammed at a brand new email address within hours of registering a new domain.
Go Daddy http://www.godaddy.com is a domain registrar that now offers private domain registrations. At the time of writing this article, they are the only registrar who currently offers this service. Hopefully in time, other registrars will pick up on this idea and offer the service too.
With a private domain registration, which costs only a few dollars more than a regular registration, your contact information including your email address will not be publicly accessible in the whois database.
That’s guaranteed to cut down on spam quite significantly as this very important source of addresses that spammers use, will no longer provide your address to them.
If you don’t wish to obtain a private domain registration, then there is another option that will be equally effective. Set up a new email address that you use only for the purpose of providing registration information for your domain name. You can easily scan email sent to that address for messages from your registrar, and delete the rest without having to read it.
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