Help Fight SPAM

Whether you are a Geek On Wheels Valued Hosting Customer or just someone who wants to know more about combating SPAM this tutorial is for you and your inbox. You wont eat it so why should you have to read it? SPAM is the number one cause of having to ask for tech support... Why? because it fills inboxes and wont let you receive any new legitimate email till the box is emptied, It disrupts valid server traffic and bandwidth slowing down your website visitor(s) experience, spreads trojans, worms and viruses, use up server resources that were better used towards legitimate traffic and downloads, causing you extra time and cost by having to dig thru a pile of spam daily looking for your day to day business emails and correspondence with clients and customers making you less productive. These 7 tips below will help you fight spam by giving you good information on what to do and dont.
 

DON'TS

1. Never use autoresponders The reason being is that if someone who is fishing for legitimate emails on your domain or someone is sending mail to an old email address and you want to inform them that the user no longer exists and to send any further emails to another email address or you set up your autoresponder to let customers or clients know you will be out of town, all you will accomplish is when a spammer sends you mail the autoresponder just confirms that the email address is valid and or gives them the new email address to send spam to.
    
2. Never click the unsubscribe link. Most spammers who send out unsolicited email (meaning you never asked for it never wanted it and never should have gotten it) will provide a FAKE unsubscribe link and  all you are doing by clicking it is confirming that the email address they sent the spam to is valid and the spam will start rolling in from all sorts of spammers. (spammers share their valid lists and sell them). If the email is from a domain or company you KNOW you have had dealings with and you don't want the emails anymore it is fairly safe to assume clicking their unsubscribe link will unsubscribe you  however even these could be fake unless you know and trust the domain to be responsible and follow the laws regarding spam (and most DONT) it is safer to not click the link but rather send an email directly to unsubscribe@theirdomain.com and ask to be removed.
 
3. Never give out your business or personal email address to just anyone or any site. The reason being is, your business if on the web depends on email. Without legitimate emails getting thru because your inbox is maxed out because of tons of spam, your customers or clients will get bounce messages saying your mail box is full which not only inhibits any of your transactions with them but also sends a message to them that you are not a professional,  on the ball company. Your domain's email address should be reserved for customers and clients ONLY not for any old website that asks you for an email address to sign up for their forum or register with their store. There are plenty of web based free email providers out there you can easily get for these type of situations.  ANY Geek On Wheels Customer may request a Gmail Invite from WebDude and it will be gladly given for this purpose and with 2GB of mail storage and up to 10MB attachments along with giving you access to other Google products like site maps and google ads and adsense Gmail will filter junk and phishing attacks for you for these instances where you need a valid email to sign up for something online. There is also Hotmail and Yahoo Mail both of which have severe limitations on approved senders and file attachments.

Spam is for your lunchbox not your INBOX

DO'S

1. Use your Email Programs Mail filters. Almost ALL POP3 email clients like Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird Mail (Our personal favorite) and many of the web based email programs like Yahoo Mail, Gmail and Hotmail have email filtering and whether you are filtering legitimate mail into appropriate folders or whether you are trying to filter spam to your junk folder or trash bin can greatly help you reduce time spent looking for that piece of email you were expecting amongst all the spam clogging your inbox and make your time spent on email more productive. Learning your email programs filtering is usually pretty easy and HELP is only a click away (in ALL programs Alt+H will open the HELP menu where you can search for information on how to properly use and  configure filters}.
 
2. Use your domains Spam Assassin and or email filters. Geek On Wheels provides Cpanel™ to all of its hosting clients and in each domains cpanel there are tools for you to use to filter or assassinate spam before it ever reaches your inbox. Simply login to your cpanel by visiting http://www.yourdomain.com/cpanel and enter the user name and password for your account. Once logged in click on the Mail Icon then you will see a list of links, Manage/Add/remove Accounts, Email Filtering and Spam Assassin and others. If you need help on how to use these wonderful tools  please call or email WebDude and I will gladly teach you how to manage your domain's email.
 
3. Forward spam to the host or ISP of the domain that is sending out the email. Most hosting companys (Geek On Wheels Included) despise spammers using their server for spam and anyone caught on our server sending out bulk email or spam will have their account terminated without question. When you receive spam, instead of replying back to the spammer who sent you the spam (The email address is probably bogus anyways) You should instead look to the full headers of the email and see what IP address or the domain it originated from and fwd the email to abuse@domain.com (where domain is the name of the hosting companies domain name) or postmaster@theirdomain.com and complain that someone on their server is sending spam. If the company is legitimate and wants to fight spam on their server as bad you don't want to get spam they will take immediate action to remove the offending account. If you need help on how to view the full email headers and learn how to find the originating hosting company the email was sent thru please call or email WebDude to set up an appointment.
 
4. Use SPF records to legitimize your domain for sending out email. Recently alot of the big ISP's like Hotmail/MSN, Verizon, Charter and others are requiring any mail sent to their domains have SPF records (Sender Policy Framework) which basically is a txt file that says you@yourdomain.com is allowed to send mail on your hosting companies server. Without an SPF record for your domain these  big ISP's will reject your email. Geek On Wheels has gone to great lengths to ensure all our hosted clients have SPF records to help aid and ensure our hosting clients' emails are legitimate and go thru to their intended recipients. If your hosting company does not have or cannot provide your domain with a SPF record it is time to find a new hosting company...

Spam Fighter Links

• Managing Spam In Outlook and Outlook Express
• Fight Spam on the Internet!
• The Federal Trade Commission's website on spam email.
• Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (C.A.U.C.E.)
• SPAM COP
• How To FIGHT SPAM!!!