By Dan Thies
October 31st 2002
Reader Rating: 8.5

Anyone who operates their own Website knows that you need to provide a way for visitors to contact you by email. The big challenge is to provide easy email access to your visitors, without letting junk mail flood your inbox. The techniques described in this article have enabled me to dramatically reduce the amount of junk mail I receive through all my sites.

Preparing and Preempting

You need a couple things before you can really take effective action against spam. Your email software must be capable of filtering incoming email -- all the major email applications (such as Eudora, Outlook, and Pegasus) support this functionality. We'll use multiple email addresses to allow us to filter out spam and identify the source -- you can't combat spam effectively without filtering.

You'll also need to use a Web host that provides unlimited email aliases or addresses, and/or a catch-all email address. An "alias" is an email address that forwards to some other address (for example, webmaster@domain.com forwarding to your real email address). A "catch-all" email address will forward any emails sent to unknown addresses in your domain.

For my own Websites I use the catch-all, so that every message goes to my real email address. If you have more than a one-person operation, however, multiple email accounts and aliases are pretty much a necessity.

Fighting Back

The first step in fighting back against spammers is to understand where they found your email address. You must diligently protect your email address if you ever hope to stop them. Once your email address falls into the wrong hands, it will be sold on CD-ROM (via junk mail, of course) to thousands of spammers. And once that happens, you've lost the fight.

Source: http://www.sitepoint.com/article/spamproof-site