One of the most common questions we get is, “how do I stop SPAM to email addresses on my website?” If you don’t know what SPAM is, you don’t use email. SPAM or unsolicited email has become a bigger problem than people ever imagined. Back in the early days of mainstream internet use, an email that was sent to someone without their permission, would likely end up in some system administrator’s mail box at your ISP and you would be reprimanded…if not completely shut down. But, as Spammers soon realized, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of other ISP’s out there that were waiting to take their money. This is when SPAM really began to become a problem.

Programs were soon created that would, “crawl” the web looking for email addresses that were posted on newsgroups, websites, forums or any other place that was publicly available. For webmasters, this became a huge problem as email is one of the easiest and most convenient ways for our users and customers to interact with us.

Today, if you publish an email address on your website, it is safe to say that your email address receives a least 1,000 spam emails a day, rendering that account virtually useless. Well, we decdied that there had to be a better way. We wanted to be able to use email addresses like info@ or sales@ and not have to be dictated to by the spammers of the world. We started by releasing our Spam Block software that allows webmasters to reclaim their violated addreses. A free service, Spam Block, uses what you might call a “Double opt-in” system where any email sent receives an auto-response asking the sender to verify the email. Essentially, the email the sender receives requires them to click on a link, and then enter a security CAPTCHA code (funny looking letters and numbers) to ensure that the sender is a real person. This system can be deployed on any email address you want to publish on a forum, website, newsgroup or other place where a bot or spammer may come across it.

We loved this technology so much, we decided to integrate it into our Web Support PRO customer service software. Now all of the benefits of our anti-spam technology are available to our Web Support users. Simply turn on the “double opt-in” setup for a particular account and all emails sent to a particular address will need to have the sender verify it’s authenticity.

So, if you operate a website and need to publish email addresses, or you want to re-claim email addresses lost to spam, our Spam Block or Web Support PRO services may be of interest to you.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 16th, 2004 at 2:46 pm and is filed under Help Desk News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.