I have provided very reliable email services to thousands of users. While it is nice to serve lots of people, it's the effects that one has on individuals that are more meaningful. Here are some tips on how I dramatically reduced one individuals spam.
The form below allows you to encode you email address into ASCII characters and will help reduce the amount of spam you receive while allowing visitors to easily click on your working mailto links.
A study on spam (Also available in PDF format) by The Center For Democracy & Technology found that placing your email address on web pages is one of the biggest sources of spam. The study also found that encoding the email address on your web pages with ASCII helped reduce it, they did not receive any spam during the 6 month study. Note that this might only be a temporary measure as spammers could decode the ASCII, but it seems to be quite effective for now.
The battle over spam is complex, here are a few things that have proved effective. Some of which I did to reduce one individual's spam from 160 per day to 10-20 per day.
Spam is more than just annoying, it costs the recipient more time and money than the sender. Junk Mail delivered through the USPO costs the sender usually a dollar or less, sending SPAM or Junk Email usually costs the sender less than .01 cents, or 100 spam for 1 cent. Sender is too kind a word for these people who send spam.
Recently I spent some time attempting to reduce the amount of spam one particular individual receives. About 3 months ago something happened and her spam went from about 5 to 15 per day to more than 100 per day. Then it kept increasing to 150 to 160 per day. We aren't quite sure what caused this increase, but it was obvious these spammers were using what we techies call web bugs to see that she was reading some of these spam. Setting her Mozilla mail client to use simple HTML stopped this problem, it changes the configuration such that images are not downloaded when she views the message. It is easy to switch back and forth if she wants to see the graphics. I think it is insane the way Outlook and many other mail clients are set to download and execute whatever mail a user receives. Email allows anyone in the world to send you something, why on earth should you trust everyone? Change the setting in your mail client or use a mail client that doesn't do something so dangerous by default.
We also run Spam Assassin (SA) on the mail server. Basically SA runs a lot of tests and gives each email a point score. We have chosen to filter mail with score of 4.0 or higher into a SPAM folder, delete scores above 15 and add some points for particular tests. SA is intensive in terms of machine resources and adds considerable costs on the recepients ISP and that cost is passed on to the consumer. Next we started adding selected spammers to a reject list in our SMTP (email) server EXIM. This proved to be somewhat effective, but was much more effective when we added configurations for some RBL's (Realtime Blackhole Lists). Note that some legitimate mail might be bounced using this method and I do not use it on my personal mail. SA also adds points for senders listed in the RBL's, I prefer to filter it. Now we are adding the ASCII encoding to our web pages.
Use this form to encode your e-mail address.
Enter your e-mail address in the first text box, click the encode button, and then highlight and copy the resulting code and paste the results into your web pages mailto tags.
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