With the large increase in spam across the internet in recent months, we thought it best to share some of the ways we can all help to reduce the problem.
As a company, we are proactively and consistently making improvements to our systems and processes all the time to avoid the spread of spam and the problem of blocklisting, but we can be even more successful if you as a customer remain vigilant. Browsing and developing websites safely and securely and using email carefully can help us all fight the ongoing battle against spam, and ensures an even better and faster experience for all our customers.
There’s a mountain of spam and security advice available on the internet, and there are countless things you can do to avoid contributing to internet spam, including:
Keeping control over your website
Moderate interaction
Stay up to date
Spring clean
Install Google Webmaster Tools
Manage your emails
Don’t post your full email address publicly on the internet in a plain text format, and delete spam emails as and when you receive them. Never reply to spam emails as the spammers will then know that your email account is active.
If you have multiple email addresses, delete any you aren’t using. If you have forwarding set up, especially for multiple accounts, make sure you aren’t just having spam forwarded between accounts.
Stay secure
Use encrypted SSL connections (https:// instead of https://) where possible, including to social network sites such as Twitter and Facebook. You can protect your own site visitors and customers as well by purchasing an SSL certificate for your website.
Password security
Be extremely careful when entering passwords in public places, particularly on touch screen phones and tablets where someone can easily look over your shoulder. Don’t stay logged into any accounts on portable devices, and ensure your passwords are as secure as possible by following our top password tips.
Scan your computer regularly using industry-standard and up to date anti-virus and anti-malware programs, and keep on top of technology news, particularly that relating to holes and bugs in scripts.
What steps do you take to combat spam and stay safe online? Let us know in the comments!
(Image credit: soshable.com)
MAILING LISTS
One option we’ve suggested to clients is using the mailing list domain as the email address. So for example, if you owned http://www.madeupdomain.com and subscribed to a Tesco mailing list you’d use [email protected] to register with them.
This way if you started receiving emails from Sainsbury addressed to [email protected] you could be pretty sure it’s been passed / sold on. It also means to stop them you just setup to reject anything TO that address.
Could you fill out the reseller feedback form with more details re your group block list suggestion please (and mention that we’re expecting it)? Then we can make sure it gets to the right people 🙂
A trick I tend to use for publishing email addresses on websites without having to use the hideous email[at]example.com method is to put a space on either side of the @ symbol, apply a class to it and then close it up with CSS.
That way the address looks right, but anything just scanning for email addresses won’t be able to use it.
I started trying this, but haven’t seen it being used anywhere else – and it seems to be successful.
The trouble when you or your clients are on a shared and someone has a spam attack is that all of your clients can then see their mail blocked from sending for 24 hours until the issue is solved and the server is once again proved ok.
If more people took their site security seriously, it would prevent hundreds of people of the same server having their mail blocked by some of the major blocking lists.
Jenni can I see some tangible evidence to support your assertion that there is a ‘large increase in spam’ as all my experience and those of legitimate business people I meet is that even modest, genuine mailing lists are triggering unwarranted reprisals from providers.
I do not believe that there has been a large increase in spam and look forward to reviewing your evidence.
Many thanks
Mike Barber
Hi Mike,
We linked to an independent source at the beginning of the post: https://labs.m86security.com/2011/08/massive-rise-in-malicious-spam/
From the website: ‘M86 Security Labs is a specialized global team of security experts and researchers who detect current and emerging Web and email threats and mitigate them quickly. By using data feeds from the Internet security community and internal intelligence gathered from M86 Security customers and products, the team analyzes information…’
A quick search also shows a number of results, including this one from Kaspersky from a few months ago: https://www.itp.net/mobile/584247-kaspersky-sees-spam-rise-11-in-february
Thanks Jenni
Have completed the form and mentioned “Jenni said you were expecting it” :o)
I never understood changing @ to [at]. Surely it’s not much use as the crawlers will most likely search for text patterns using [at] also.
Graphical versions of email addresses also annoy me – having to manually type in someones’s rediculously long domain complete with multiple hyphens is one way to loose my interest.
But most importantly, removing mailto link affects usability and this will hinder your visitors ability to get in touch. They should simply just be able to click a link to send you an email – not everyone is a computer genious.
Request to heart internet: Rules for Spam filtering.
I take all the usual precautons to reduce spam (using email alias for mailing lists etc) but have just started receiving a huge amount of spam from someone using Yahoo groups. These emails are addressed to the same list of people. I don’t want to block yahoo as an email domain for obvious reasons, but if Heart Spam Filtering enabled me to set up a simple rule, I could block any email that was also sent or cc’d to a couple of the other people on the list. (could also be used to reject emails containing character strings etc).
I suspect you buy off-the-shelf spam filtering solutions so can’t change this, but to setup rules like this would make a huge difference.
Hi Stuart, thanks for your suggestion. You could try using a mail client such as Outlook which allows you to set up advanced rules. It’s also worth reporting the spammer to Yahoo to target the source of the problem. More here: https://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/abuse/spam/
Hi Jenni, thanks for your reply, but email clients are no good as most of the spam comes through on my mobile where this is not available – I need the spam to be filtered out at the server. Heart’s current setup is great for blocking individual users or whole domains -but can’t help for cases like this – where spammers generate a different email address from Yahoo with each email sent, so blocking individual email addresses is pointless.All that leaves is blocking a whole domain which you can’t do when it’s Yahoo or Hotmail as you would block genuine emails. I suspect Yahoo won’t be able to do anything for this reason – it’s not from a single user but newly generated/faked account each time.
Anyway – thanks for your help – please would you pass on the suggestion for improving customisable filtering and content filtering spam protection to someone – it would be a big help.