Here’s a couple more tips on how to avoid spam from your website. Some spammers will do what’s called a “directory harvest attack” (DHA). That is they’ll send spam by “guessing” at common versions or usernames combined with your domain name, such as jane@janepotmaker.com, jane.doe@janepotmaker.com, janedoe@janepotmaker.com, info@janepotmaker.com, or support@janepotmaker.com. When the spammer finally hits on an a valid email address, that is when an email address is not rejected because it doesn’t exist, they’ll add it to their list of spam email addresses.
So how do you avoid this version of spam harvesting?
1. Create a unique email address- If you can, try to stay away from some of the more common versions of email addresses such as:
- firstname.lastname@yourdomain
- firstinital.lastname@yourdomain
- firstname_lastname@yourdomain
- firstnamelastname@yourdomain
- firstnamelastinital@yourdomain
- info@yourdomain
- support@yourdomain
- sales@yourdomain
Try to create a email address that’s harder to guess…like an email address that contains a combination of letters and numbers, such as jdp081999@janepotmaker.com.
2. Turn off your “catch-all” email feature- If your hosting service offers what’s called a “catch-all” mail feature, which means that that email that’s addressed to anything ending with your domain name…make sure that it’s turned off. Since anything that’s addressed to your domain will be seen as valid, that means that leaving that feature on is just going to bring an avalanche of spam from spammers using the DHA technique. Turn it off!
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I temporarily changed my email address while I was transferring my domains to avoid potential downtime… Although after everything was set up again I decided to stay with the new email address. It was incredible the sheer quantity of spam arriving at the original address.
I’m also guilty of the using the “catch-all” feature in the past too. I blame my inner control freak… lol
Hey John…thanks for the comment!
Yup, I’m definitely guilty of the “catch-all” email address too because I’m always afraid of missing that “important” email. It will be really nice to have an “almost” empty junk mail box!
Nicolette