I hate the canned meat and the junk email called spam!! I don't know to many who like either but I lately I would have much rather had the canned pork each day for lunch the past month and a half than attacking my store and rendering my business lifeless. This past month (beginning April 4th to be exact) SPAM has run rampant through my business emails. Not until a couple of weeks ago did we realize despite the hundreds of junk emails we were deleting each day there where still thousands still lurking in the que preventing REAL emails to come in. We have about 15 different business email addresses based on service and five major ones were attacked with an average of 1000 spams a day. Half were still bypassing filters and the other half were overloading spam folders. In other words, it's been a nightmare. We are changing our email addresses and placing a captcha contact form to help alleviate the invasion so we may be able to conduct business more timely. For those customers, reps, affiliates and inquires who have been affected by us not returning emails I sincerly apologize. Hopefully we have emailed everyone back with an explaination about our delayed reponse. If we haven't answered your email or processed your order within a week the email may have been deleted in error. Please resend your email. With this expensive and long lesson we have some tips from our webhost and things we learned along the way to help you prevent an attack on your email:
- Use a Black & White List: This is something I have been trying to avoid for a while now because as a business sometimes even my reponse emails are sent to customer's spam. It's frustrating because I want them to know I responded but when the reponse comes back undeliverable.
- Have at least 2 email addresses. Have a strictly personal email address for friends and use the black & white list. Use the other email address for other things and always add the email address to your safe list for people you are requesting a response from.
- Greylisting: A temporary email rejection. This is something we are considering for our personal email addresses. Here is a little more info on it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting).
- Make your email adress as weird as possible. It is less likely you will be picked up by a Spam list. For example Sam123@hotmail.com is more likely to be targeted than 123Sam44@hotmail.com.
- If you have a business, blog or are part of a social network do not publish your email or have link to your address. This will prevent computer generated emails if your email address is published as Sam(at)hotmail(dot)com than Sam@hotmail.com. Make sure businesses state they will not share your email address or publish it if it is a social network.
- Report it or Unsubscribe. This can be a pain but it will be helpful. Report constant emails from overtly porographic websites immediately. For sites you visited or purchased from you may have been added to their mail list automatically. I would just unsubscribe. If you still receive emails after unsubscribing I would then report as spam.
We would love to hear if you have any additional tips to battle Spam.
I hate the canned meat and the junk email called spam!! I don't know to many who like either but I lately I would have much rather had the canned pork each day for lunch the past month and a half than attacking my store and rendering my business lifeless. This past month (beginning April 4th to be exact) SPAM has run rampant through my business emails. Not until a couple of weeks ago did we realize despite the hundreds of junk emails we were deleting each day there where still thousands still lurking in the que preventing REAL emails to come in. We have about 15 different business email addresses based on service and five major ones were attacked with an average of 1000 spams a day. Half were still bypassing filters and the other half were overloading spam folders. In other words, it's been a nightmare. We are changing our email addresses and placing a captcha contact form to help alleviate the invasion so we may be able to conduct business more timely. For those customers, reps, affiliates and inquires who have been affected by us not returning emails I sincerly apologize. Hopefully we have emailed everyone back with an explaination about our delayed reponse. If we haven't answered your email or processed your order within a week the email may have been deleted in error. Please resend your email. With this expensive and long lesson we have some tips from our webhost and things we learned along the way to help you prevent an attack on your email:
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