A surge in SPAM emails

[Gillf]

Hi
Is anyone else seeing a surge in the volume of SPAM - or is it just me? :(

Gill

[needundies]

Gill, I have seen a huge increase in spam over the last couple of months, we are going to have to try to find a solution soon before we are overwhelmed! :eek:

Andy

[Dave]

Hi
Is anyone else seeing a surge in the volume of SPAM - or is it just me? :(

Gill

Morning Gill,

There are a couple of things you could do to your site to reduce the risk of getting spam as follows

1) Go into Content-->Form Manager-->Contact Us and click Enable Image Verification. This will put an extra field on the contact us form where visitors will have to add two numbers together and enter the answer. This will stop any automated bots filling in and sending the contact form to you.

2) Your e-mail address is shown in plain text. Either upload as an image or re-type it as info at ever-so-sexy dot com. People have software that trawl the net looking for e-mail addresses on sites to spam and this would stop this happening. It does not look very nice but in my experience most people use the contact form anyway.

Examples of both the above can be found on one of my sites here
http://www.hptonercartridges.co.uk/contact.html

Finally, nothing to do with the above but why not include some anchor text and link to your site in your signature? It certainly will not do any harm and search engines will like it!

[Dave]

Also try to avoid putting your e-mail address on sites which link to you. I notice doing a quick search for your e-mail address it is also listed on www dot eroticprints dot org!

[john]

When we had our Craptinic site, it was on our own server and we had spam filtered out by SpamAssasin at the email server level.
I have asked Rich to do this with Bluepark (takes a few minutes to do) but he is reluctant to do this as it will apply to all email accounts and he is worried that there may be genuine emails not able to get through.
I for one can live with this and would rather have the spam destroyed at server level and not have to keep deleting messages that escape Cloudmark etc.,

Hands up all that would like Rich to start up Spam filtering at server level.

[Dave]

When we had our Craptinic site, it was on our own server and we had spam filtered out by SpamAssasin at the email server level.
I have asked Rich to do this with Bluepark (takes a few minutes to do) but he is reluctant to do this as it will apply to all email accounts and he is worried that there may be genuine emails not able to get through.
I for one can live with this and would rather have the spam destroyed at server level and not have to keep deleting messages that escape Cloudmark etc.,

Hands up all that would like Rich to start up Spam filtering at server level.

We do not have any problems with Spam (at the moment) but I am all for having Spam filtering in place to prevent possible attacks!

[petad]

Hi
Is anyone else seeing a surge in the volume of SPAM - or is it just me? :(

GillWe have seen an increase in SPAM, but very little through Bluepark. We have implemented the suggestions from Dave already, and it seems to work.

I would personally NOT vote for a server based block, as we do get genuine emails trapped sometimes.

If you don't want the hassle of reviewing all the SPAM, just delete en masse.

Pete

[Dave]

Just noticed an order on one of my Bluepark sites and for some reason did not get the New Order Notification Message. Bit worrying really because was just checking something on the site and noticed an order sitting there that I knew nothing about.

Maybe I will change my mind about the server block :)

[Gillf]

Hi again and thanks to Dave for suggestions.

Have changed the contact form.

I had thought having the contact email as plain text rather than a live mail link was enough to deter the bots and did not really want to go as far as replacing the @ with and and the . with dot.

Will leave that change for a while, especially as I think that any changes to the site or links out on the web might not make much difference because I have noticed that the majority of this surge are using the web address with a random name placed in front. Now I am not an expert in these things but I would have thought it was probably fairly simple to create a program that took a live web address and then converted it to hundreds of email addresses by replacing the www. with the random addition of forenames and a @. If that is what is happening then I can't think of any way of stopping it other than filtering and like others here I am worried that might block good mail.

Call me wicked, but what I would like is some mean software that returned the SPAM to the sender. Not once but twice! Hmmm .... gives me a really evil pleasure to think of the idiot SPAMMER spending hours trying to find their genuine mail among the dross.

A good spin on the phrase "what goes around comes around" don't you think?

Cheers

Gill

[Dave]

Hi Gill,

I assume that you are using a catch-all e-mail address if you are getting e-mails arriving with strangename@ etc. Easy solution to this would be to remove the catch-all e-mail address and the e-mails would then just bounce back to the Spammer (Although I doubt they give a valid e-mail address anyway!)

If any customers/suppliers send an e-mail they have spelt incorrectly it will also bounce back and no doubt they will call you to confirm the e-mail address.

Other things you could do is remove your e-mail address from the contact page so it forces everyone to use the contact form which now has image verification.

Finally another thing to try is be different with you e-mail addresses. A lot of small companies tend to use sales@, support@, info@ why not use sales-office@ or sales-dept@ or just yourname@

[Gillf]

Thanks again Dave. I've removed the catch all and that has resulted a dramatic reduction in SPAM. Lovely.

Gill

[Dave]

Thanks again Dave. I've removed the catch all and that has resulted a dramatic reduction in SPAM. Lovely.

Gill

Hi Gill

That's great news. Thanks for the update