Spam & Junk Email

Spam & Junk Email

Spam ...Junk Email ...we all get it and the majority of us detest it !

In this article I will not try to tell you WHY we all get spam that's easy...

there are potential customers out there looking for your product right now, thousands of them, hundreds of thousands perhaps.....they don`t know how good your Business is ....if I offered to get in touch with 500,000 potential customers of yours and tell them about your Business and your product, and the service you offer - FREE , no charge to you what so ever....what would you say ?

...I can however tell you HOW it gets to YOU, the process which ends up with it arriving in YOUR email folder, if we know that, we can do something about stopping it !

spam filters on your email program are not the answer, it is way to late by then....spam filtering engines are just playing catch up and always will...if you`ve ever used one you will know what I mean, and even when they do put `junk in the junk folder` we still look at it to make sure it hasn't siphoned off a `good` email ....they make a lot of money for a lot of big businesses, but quite frankly they will never work, they do not stop spam, they merely try to cope with it.

back to basics for a moment if I may .....if you didn't have an email address you would never receive junk email....

if only the people you wanted to know your email address knew it, you wouldn't get junk email (unless your friends are spammers of course)

that`s the key to virtually eliminating junk email - only those people you want to know your email address should have it.........

......hhmmm you want potential customers to have it don`t you, you want them to be able to email you don't you ....tough one isn't it...

actually no it`s not difficult at all ..................you want potential customers to be able to contact you via the internet, phone, post, pigeon...whatever.....after they have contacted you then give them your email address !!

lets now look at how spammers get your email address .......

for years we have been shouting it....we want new customers to contact us email was the new way...but all we get is junk email !!

spammers (these are not those people who send you nasty emails containing viruses etc) are businesses, they don't know you, they simply want live, real email addresses, they then can sell that information, it`s called marketing, they get your email address in the following ways :-

1 - its plastered all over your website, in the recent past yes, that's what we were told to do, its how our customers did contact us, spam was also in its infancy back then and it was an annoyance we could handle.

2 - it`s guessed ! ....if you run a business there`s a good chance that if I sent an email to enquiries@ ..sales@ ...accounts@ ...info@yourbusiness.com it would find it`s way to you ....we even had `catch all` email that would make sure that you got email even if it was address to `hairyarms@yourbusiness.com`

times have changed, the spammers get technical and so must we....

ways to stop your email address being used by spammers...

rule 1 ....you want potential customers to be able to contact you

it is no longer wise to show an email address on a website, sad but true...
robots visit your website regularly...it`s how we get them listed on search engines, we need them to visit....
harvesting robots also visit your website, they trawl the pages looking for email addresses, and these things are clever, very clever ....

if your website has a contact us page for example, then you can bet your life there is a good chance that there will be your email address somewhere on that page, the robot will find it and read it, and you will get spam...

next website creators encoded email addresses so that they couldn't be read by the robots, that situation is just holding right now, but it wont last for long...

if I made a picture with the letters that make up your email address on it, and your logo on it for example, humans would be able to read and understand it the robots would be thwarted ....think again...

have you seen those little images sprouting up all over the place next to forms that you fill in online ? ...they have jumbled letters or numbers on weird backgrounds ....they are called CAPTCHA`s they are there because spam technology is so advanced that that little image can be scanned and the letters `recognised`....just as you might scan a magazine article and turn it into editable text....distorted text against a patterned background is very difficult to interpret.

this kind of technology will soon become common place so even a `picture` of your email address wont be safe enough..

enough bad news.....lets be positive ..there are ways to reduce or virtually eliminate junk email

over the years we have built up experience and expertise which we pass on to our customers ...allowing internet users to be able to contact you via your website and doing all we can to reduce spam email...

if your email address needs to be visible on your website it must always be encoded or as an image

website forms are one of the best ways to combat spam, because the destination email address is not known, and that is the key...once a customer has contacted you, then you can email them back, you want them to know your email address..

that form is like a delivery shute for email direct to your inbox...the person who fills in the form has no idea of the email address it goes to, only that they are contacting you.

spam technology is sophisticated ...web robots can submit forms automatically sending you junk information....they are getting smarter and can interpret those CAPTCHA images I mentioned earlier ...BUT and here is the best BUT of all...

we....you and your webmaster can do a great deal to filter that form preventing automated form submission is something we at web informed can do well, the forms we produce may look simple and docile, but there can be up to three tiers of anti robot submission built into every one.

finally and this sadly is the only loophole ...your email address can be guessed...

once contact between you and your customer has been made your email address becomes known,

sales@ ..... enquiries@ ......orders@ and so on are all likely and logical email addresses ..... the spammers know this too

if your business email address was something like "71ghT5o*%Psd@yourbusiness.com" you would never receive junk email....

but if you sent an email to a potential customer from that address when they see it they will ...you`ve guessed it....thinks it junk email and bin it !!

there are email addresses which are logical and understandable to a human being, but not quite as easy for a spammer to guess...here we turn the tables on them, and they have to try and catch up with us...

when they receive an email from an address like "the_sales_assistant@yourbusiness.com" ...they will read it and not think it junk, after all they are expecting you to contact them.....

at web-informed we are confident about our techniques to reduce spam significantly, we have other tricks up our sleeves too, but wont write them on this page... there are bots about !!

if you would like to discuss how to reduce spam long term we are more than happy to arrange a meeting..