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Spam

You really would have to have been living under a rock not to be aware of the problem of spam. But people tend to think of spam only in connection with their email and don’t realise that a web site can also have spam problems.

When you put your email address on your web site so that people can contact you, spammers can use programs to find email addresses on web sites and add you to their mailing lists. Once one spammer has your address, it gets passed around to all of the other spammers. Anyone who has had their address unprotected on a web site for a few years will probably be finding the address is attracting several hundred spam messages a day.

There are a number of techniques that can be used to make email addresses on web pages much hard for spammers to find using their automatic searches while appearing to be a perfectly normal and usable address to any human visitors to the site.

Another problem is potentially missing email enquiries from the site because the genuine enquiries are lost in a sea of spam messages. This can be helped by using a contact form on the site. A contact form will always come from the same address so it will not get filtered by your email program. It also means you have an option not to display your email address at all (which may be preferable for a personal site where you want to protect your privacy).

Even with the contact form there can be spam problems if the form is not given adequate protection. Using some simple tricks a spammer can use the contact form on someone else’s web site to send out their spam mail. This is bad for you because the people who receive the spam think you sent it. And if your web site domain gets blacklisted on mail servers because it has been sending out lots of spam you may not be able to reliably send email.

Because we know and understand these spam threats to your site we are able to make your site as safe as is possible so that you do not have to worry so much about being a victim of spam. We can also help set up your email accounts to minimise the impact the spam you may already be experiencing.

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