How to Stop Spam: 9 Tips for Blocking Junk Email

As time goes by and depending on how public your email address is, you become susceptible to receiving more and more spam. As spammers experiment with new strategies every day, it’s important to enhance your spam protection to keep unwanted emails away. Here’s how to stop spam using a few simple, proven methods.

Use SpamAssassin

SpamAssassin is a wonderful tool that comes with your cPanel, and one of the easiest ways to stop spam without extra setup. It won’t block any incoming emails but will tag them as spam so you know the message is suspicious. You can even blacklist domains and email accounts so they’re marked as spam, or whitelist specific domains and addresses so they’re always marked as legitimate. Login to your cPanel and look for Apache SpamAssassin under the Email section.

Disguise your email address

Avoid coding your email address in regular text to reduce the instances of spam-bots picking it up. Simply replace the @ symbol with the word “at” or code the email address in HTML. Remove your email address from all public places, guest blogs, forum postings, web pages and any other easily readable text formats, to stay away from spam-bots.

Unsubscribe

If you’ve used your email address for mailing lists and subscriptions, consider opting out. Before you subscribe to any list, check that the site has a policy not to rent or sell your email address to third parties. This is one of the simplest ways to stop spam from piling up, simply find the unsubscribe button at the end of the email and click. Ensure you unsubscribe from all the emails you want to get rid of, sometimes you may have to take additional steps to fully unsubscribe.

Prevent brute force attacks

When a spammer attempts a brute force attack, they’ll try several different combinations to guess active email addresses. A short email address like hi@example.com is more likely to receive spam from brute force attacks compared to a longer email address.

Protect your email address

Wondering how spammers found your email address in the first place? In all likelihood, they picked it up from public websites. Don’t give out your address where possible, it helps to set up a separate email account for receiving spam and use that address for registering all your public accounts. The more people who know your email address, the more spam you’ll receive, so keep it closely guarded.

Use CAPTCHAs

Spam-bots are automated to write malicious messages and comments on websites. Add a CAPTCHA to your contact form as well as your blog settings. This is one of the most effective ways to stop spam generated by bots specifically.

Blacklist known spammers

A blacklist helps to permanently block emails from specific servers or senders. Some email programmes come pre-loaded with blacklists, but you can also find lists that help identify specific domains notorious for generating spam. Once you’ve blacklisted a domain, sender or server, you can’t receive any email from them.

Leverage your spam filter properly

Whenever you receive spam, don’t simply delete it. Select it and inform your mail client that the message is spam. If you use Gmail, simply click the “Report Spam” button in the toolbar. You should also train your email client about false positives, take a look at your spam filter regularly to find messages that aren’t actually spam, and when you spot one, tell your email client it’s not spam (in Gmail, click “Not spam”).

Change your email address (last resort)

If you’re simply overwhelmed with spam, this could be your best bet. You’ll have to let your legitimate contacts know about the change, and may even have to juggle two addresses for the first few months. However, once you let go of your old address, you should see the amount of spam coming down significantly.

How to block unwanted emails directly in cPanel

If spam keeps bypassing your filtering software and landing in your inbox, here’s how to stop spam at the source using the SpamAssassin tool directly in cPanel. SpamAssassin is an automated filter that uses several techniques to find and filter spam emails.

Step 1:

Apache SpamAssassin. Once inside your cPanel account, click on Apache SpamAssassin in the Email section, then click Configure Apache SpamAssassin.

Step 2:

Block unwanted emails. On the configuration page, you’ll find a variety of options for blocking spam. You can block particular email addresses, say you want to block all emails from abc@site1.com, simply plug this address into the blacklist form and all emails from it will be blocked. However, you’ll still receive emails from another address on the same domain, such as xyz@site1.com.

You can also use a pattern to stop all emails from a particular domain. To block all addresses ending with site2.com, plug in the domain in this format: *@site2.com, and all emails from any address ending with this domain will be blocked. Once you’ve added all the addresses you want, click Save at the bottom of the page.

Going forward, all emails from the addresses listed in the blacklist will be blocked.

If you’re receiving spam from several different email accounts and domain names, you can reduce the value of the required_score field to make the mail filter stricter. Stricter rules mean you may end up missing legitimate emails that get identified as spam erroneously, so the safest approach is to keep the score at the default value of 5.

In conclusion

Spammers are always devising new tricks to find their way into people’s inboxes, so it’s important to be proactive when it comes to protecting yourself against spam. The strategies above, from basic prevention through to a full cPanel walkthrough, should help bring your spam down drastically. As your Melbourne web design agency, we can help you set this up. If you’re in the market for a stellar website at affordable rates, get in touch with Digital Developments.