Tips to stop spam

As time goes by and depending on how public your email address is, you would 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 away unwanted emails.

Here are some tips to stop or slow down spam.

SpamAssassin

SpamAssassin is a wonderful tool that comes with your cPanel. It won’t block any incoming emails but would tag them as spam so you know that the message is suspicious. You can even black-list domains and email accounts so that they are marked as spam. Similarly, you can white-list specific domains and email addresses that would always be marked as legitimate.

Login to your cPanel and look for Apache SpamAssassin under the Email section.

Disguise your email address

Avoid coding the text in regular text to reduce the instances of spam-bots picking up your email address. 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 the spam-bots.

Unsubscribe

If you have used your email address for mailing lists and subscriptions, consider opting out of those subscriptions. Before you subscribe to any list, check to ensure the site has a policy to not rent or sell your email address to third parties.

Prevent brute force attacks

When a spammer attempts a brute force attack, he will try several different combinations to try and guess active email addresses. A short email address like hi@example.com is more likely to receive spam from brute force attacks when compared to a long email address.

Protect your email address

Wondering how those spammers found your email address? In all likelihood, they picked your address from public websites. Do not 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.

Use captchas

Spam-bots are automatized to write malicious messages and comments on websites. Add a CAPTCHA to your contact form as well as to your blog settings. This can dramatically reduce the amount of spam you are receiving via spam-bots.

In Conclusion

Spammers are always devising new tricks to find their way into people’s inboxes. So it is important to be proactive when it comes to protecting yourself against spam. The above strategies should help bring down the spam emails drastically.