4 Ways To Fight Spam

Spam email is always a pain to deal with as it takes time to sort through every day. It not only wastes your time but it can also contain virus’s and Trojans all eager for you to click on that single unsuspecting link and damage your computer or steal your personal details.

Thankfully there are ways to combat spam, some are easy to do and some take a little setup to get right. Here we list some of the ways you can effectively fight spam.

1. Obscure Your Email Address

Don’t write your email address on your website. Spammers will harvest email addresses from millions of websites and having your email showing makes this really easy for them.

Instead consider using an image with your email address displayed that a human can read but makes it difficult for a ‘bot’.

You can also use a contact form for customers and clients to get in touch - just don’t forget to add what is called a ‘captcha’ to prevent automated software sending you emails through the form instead!

2. BoxTrapper

BoxTrapper is built in to cPanel and allows you to activate e-mail verification for those that are not on a white list. This means that any mail address that is not placed on your white list will be required to send back a verification email to ensure that they are not a spammer. This option is extremely useful in preventing automated mailings that you do not wish to receive from reaching your inbox.

You can enable BoxTrapper for your mail account using the following steps.

1. Login to cPanel.

2. Go to the section called ‘Email’.

3. Click on the icon ‘BoxTrapper’.

4. Select the mail account which you need to enable BoxTrapper on and click the option ‘Manage’.

5. Click the button ‘Enable’.

6. Don’t forget to add your contacts to the white list and also review the “Review Queue” periodically to allow emails through which you missed off your white list.

3. Apache SpamAssassin

SpamAssassin is installed on our servers and used to check email message contents and give it a score based on certain spam characteristics. If it is scored above a set limit then it is marked as Spam.

The Spam score is set to 5 as default and any score of 5 or more causes the message to be marked as spam. If you want to allow all types of messages from a particular IP addresses then Whitelist it. If you do not want to allow any type of messages from a particular IP addresses then Blacklist it.

You can enable the SpamAssassin using the following steps.

1. Login to cPanel.

2. Go to the section ‘Mail’.

3. Click on the icon ‘Apache SpamAssassin’.

4. Click the button ‘Enable Apache SpamAssassin’.4. Greylisting

When you enable Greylisting, the mail server will temporarily reject any email from a sender that the server does not recognise. If the email is legitimate, the server that sent it will try to send the email again after a short delay. After a sufficient amount of time, the server will accept the email.

To enable or disable Greylisting on a domain, perform the following steps:

1. Select the ‘Configure Greylisting’ option from the ‘Email’ section of your control panel.

2. Locate the domain in the list, or enter the domain name in the Search text box.

3. Click on/off to enable or disable Greylisting.

*We automatically white-list know large email providers such as Hotmail, Outlook, Gmail, iCloud & Yahoo.

By using some or all of these methods you should be able to defeat the majority of the spam that comes your way.

Looking for a webhost that provides all of these options? Get in touch today.