Email Best Practices (Avoiding Spam)

In conjunction with our SpamGate system, there are a number of good practices you yourself can follow when dealing with email addresses to avoid giving spammers an easy time.

Common Emails

Almost as soon as a new domain name is registered, spam can often be sent to certain email addresses on that domain to 'test the water' as it were. These targets are common email addresses that the domain may use. These are, sales@, webmaster@, contact@, admin@, support@. If at all possible try to avoid using these prefixes. Obviously this is not always practical but it's best to be aware.

Catchall Email Addresses

People love catchalls. Send an email to anything@yourdomain.com and it gets delivered to you. It helps if your visitor or correspondent mistypes your email address. It also helps managing all those pesky email addresses you may have. Right?

True to a point, but think about this from a spam perspective. A spammer is virtually guaranteed to get their message to you if they send to anything@yourdomain.com. Coupled with this, spammers engage in a practice called 'Dictionary Attacking' which means, they will send email to a@ b@ c@yourdomain.com in the vague attempt that one email address works for your domain name. With a catchall, all of these spam emails will be delivered. This process in extreme circumstances can lead to an overloading of your email server. 3DPixel would then have to take action.

How to avoid this? Catchalls are great to only have to manage a single email address. This can also be achieved by using email aliasing.

Plesk > yourdomain.com > Mail > you@yourdomain.com > Add New Email Alias

For example: if you had me@yourdomain.com already set up, and had an Ebay account you would like to associate with that. You could add ebay@yourdomain.com as an alias of me@yourdomain.com. This provides the ease of managing a single domain, without the spam risks of a catchall email address.

For reference, catchall emails can be disabled through:

Plesk > yourdomain.com > Mail > Preferences > Mail to nonexistent user (REJECT)

Publishing Your Email Address On Your Website

Obviously, you need to give people your email if they are to contact you. It is common to put these email contacts on a 'Contact Us' page on your site. How can you avoid giving the emails to visitors you want to hear from, and not spammers?

Encode your emails: use of 'Character Entities' will present a visible, clickable link for email to your visitors, but for spiders, robots, spam html scrapers (content stealers and email harvesters) it will look like gibberish.

Please use this third party site email converter (new window) to encode your emails.