Thrift Store Websites Help Site

502 E Canal Street
Peru, IN 46970

(765)475-4974

www.thrifthelp.com

Preventing eMail Spam

Spam email is a fact of life on the internet that gets worse everyday. It clogs our mail boxes and often offends our sense of decency. However there are measures you can take to help reduce your exposure to internet spammers.

No "@" sign on your Home Page:
First thing we recommend is that you do not place any email address on your Home Page. One method spammers use to "harvest" email addresses is by creating software programs that crawl over internet websites looking for the "@" sign which indicates the text field contains an email address. If you want to include an email address on your website most people would expect to find it on the "Contact" page which also has a field for this purpose.

Use the Filters:
The Thrift Store Websites Mail System also contains a set of filter tools in each email box. You can find these by clicking on in your email box main page. While spammers have found various techniques to bypass word filters by misspelling words and adding odd characters and spaces, it might still be worth the effort if your spam mail contains the same words used repeatedly.

Never Reply to Spam:
When you reply to spam you are confirming that you read their mail which only leads to more spam.

Dummy your email address:
If you must give your eMail address to an internet company, dummy it up by replacing the @ symbol with the word "at" as in . This will prevent automatic loading of your eMail address into spam lists. If someone can't figure out how to contact you by inserting the @ system properly, then you probable don't want mail from them anyway.

Get a Freebie address for eCommerce:
If you like to shop on the internet or sign up for services, etc. get a free email address from gmail or hotmail. Use this address for online use and save your personal or practice website email box for personal or business use only.

Change your address periodically:
Another method you might implement is to change the email address on a periodic basis for email addresses of a general nature. If your site contains an email address like Info@mystore.com, that begins to accumulate large amounts of spam email you can delete this email address and replace it with one like Infor@mystore.com.  After a period of time you can delete this one and replace it with Information@mystore.com. Over a period of a year you might rotate the name several times, then back to the original name to counteract the spammers who have given up or changed their target addresses. Be sure to update the email address on your website Contact Page each time you change or rotate the mail box name.