Is Your Website Spam Resistant?
Overview of this week's e-Newsletter
Did you know that owning a website could be a cause for receiving more of that unwanted nasty spam in your email's inbox? This week I'm going to go over some of these sources and ways to handle or minimize them and your chances of receiving more spam.

Why Your Website Could Be Causing...
You To Receive More Spam.
The factors that open the door to the spammers.
First here's a brief overview of what spam is and how you get it. Spam is defined as unsolicited bulk or mass emails sent out over the Internet, usually the contents of the email are commercial in nature. Now how you usually get spam is from an email address that is not actually the spammer's own email. This trick or hack is called spoofing or to spoof. Spoofing is the act of sending out email under an address that is not actually your email address. A spammer (one who sends out spam) can do this by using computer programs created for spamming or by exploiting vulnerable software and website programs to send out their spam for them.

So how could your website be forwarding their attempts? I have listed below, in no particular order, some of the top things that can make you more vulnerable.

1. Having your email address on your website. Spammers have gotten much more sophisticated and are now able to run programs from their computer that search websites looking for and harvesting email addresses to add to their spamming list. Therefore they don't usually look at the websites themselves; the program does it for them. But having your email address on your website is unfortunately one easy way to get your self on a spammer's email list.
   
2. Not privately registering a domain name (a domain name is the web address used to located your website, e.g. www.YourName.com). When registering your domain name most domain name registers will give you the option to privately register your domain (although it usually will cost extra). If you don't choose that option your name, email, and contact info are usually viewable as public record of who owns that domain name. Spammers will search though these public records and add emails they find onto their list of people to spam.
   
3. Some website contact forms having security holes that leave them vulnerable to spammers. Not only can certain security holes let spammers get your email address but some can even allow spammers a place to send spam from.
   
4. Putting your email address on other websites, message boards, forums, and blogs. Spammers can search these websites to located email addresses which they will then send spam to.

Well, that's not a complete list but it should help you understand some of the basic vulnerabilities.

What You Can Do!
How to prevent the above vulnerabilities.
Now for what you can do about those issues listed above. Possible solution are listed below in the order they where gone over above.

1. Having your email address on your website for clients/viewers to contact you is a must have for some website owners. Luckily there are a few ways to still display your email address or at least provide a way of contacting you though email with out leaving you open to the spammers.
   (a.) One way is to have a contact form on your website that sends the content submitted to your email address.
   (b.) Masking your email address when displayed on your website by putting spaces or other characters that will make the address only readable by someone actually looking at it. Example: if your email address is name@email.com then you could display your email address as name @ email.com (again spammers are using programs and will not actually look at the address to see if it's correct)
   
2. Register all your domain names as a private registration. When you do this your email, name, and contact information will be kept private and out of the public records, therefore no spammers can get your address.
   
3. Have a website designer or web security company do an audit on your website's contact form to ensure there are no security holes.
   
4. Refrain from submitting your email address to places on the Internet where it will be posted for public viewing. Or as an alterative submit your email address in a fashion that is only readable by an actual viewers. Just as I stated before most spammers use a program to gather email addresses and therefore will not bother to actually look to see if your address is correct or properly formatted (in most cases it will not even be picked up by their programs unless it's properly formatted).

Final Words
Ending comments
Well I hope that helps you and your fight against spam. If you want to check out some other interesting websites related to this subject here are a few good ones.

www.ftc.gov/spam/ - report spam to the Federal Trade Commission and has lots of other information on spam.

www.spamcop.net - by reporting spam to this website you can help provide anti-spam related software with data about what types of emails are possibly spam related.

And as always, look for next week's newsletter where we hope to provide you with more useful tips and advice. If you have any suggestions about topics you would like to hear more about please send us an email with your thoughts.