Designing a Spam Proof Ecommerce Web Site
A Home Business Article Contributed by Alina Sandor
More Spam Designed for Ecommerce Web Site
Spammers are getting smart and are designing ways to stick it to your ecommerce web site. They design programs that will collect email addresses of people who freely give their email addresses out: business web sites.Then the email address is sold on CD-ROM to thousands of spammers.
But you can head them off at the pass! Read on!
Design Your Ecommerce Web Site to Beat Spam
Your first defence against spam is the email software you use for your ecommerce email address. Set it on high to filter out the junk that comes in, that way you never even have to look at it. The first step is the easiest.
Next you will need to make sure your Web host provides unlimited email aliases or addresses, and/or a catch-all email address. The "alias" will forward junk to some other address than to your real email address, throwing the Spammers off of your trail. These are great if you have the need for more than one address, like one for questions and one for comments. The catch-all email address will forward any emails sent to unknown addresses in your domain, meaning, every message will go to your real email address.
Design Protection for Your Ecommerce Web Site Email Address
When you register a domain name, make sure to use an email address account that you never use such as a Hotmail account. This way spammers can get your real email from the domain site.
Also, Never use your business address to get newsletters, buy things online, free-for-all link pages or on any other web form. Spammers will use addresses from these forms to send their spam.
To keep spammers from getting your email address directly from your site you need to protect it. It is a good idea to list your contact addresses as youraddress at yourdomain.com instead of youraddress@yourdomain.com. This keeps the programs spammers use from picking up on your address but still lets customers know what it is.
Another way you can keep these programs from picking up your address is adding a small bit of JavaScript in place of an email address.
These programs have the inability to process scripts. Script makes address invisible to the programs, while leaving the email address accessible to your customer with all but the most primitive Web browsers.
You can also cut out the need to do the above by simply removing your email address from your site, and using a contact form instead. The form will allow your users to fill in a form, and send you an email. A contact form can also allow you to deal with a higher volume of mail by pre-sorting different types of message.
Since the spam programs simply reads HTML source of pages in to find anything that looks like an email address, your contact form may not protect you, if you include your email address in the form's HTML, though so you may want to use JavaScript to mask your address. You can get free ASP, Perl, and PHP scripts at many sites online.
