Invasion of the Email Snatchers

There are other scripts that hide your email address from the robots, but not your site visitors. Many of them crawl your entire site, following every link, gathering email addresses from your guestbook, your message boards, databases, and everywhere else they can get to. They put your email addresses on CDRom and sell them- as opt-in lists. You've seen them, 20,000 targeted email addresses for only $29. What you didn't know was that it was YOUR email address they were selling.

Quickly Eliminate 100% of Your Junk Email

Since I have many email accounts, I decided to try it on my personal address and test its effectiveness. You can also enter the email addresses of all your friends, family, and business contacts ahead of time so they never receive the initial auto response. This feature is normally bundled with other email services provided by either your Internet Service Provider (ISP) or website host (most likely, the latter. In this case a whitelist is maintained to show who is allowed to email you. For some reason, they never sent me an email asking me to invest.

Is Your Website Blacklisted?

If your IP address is present on a blacklist then you're potentially wasting your time sending email to customers. When an IP address is added to a permanent blacklist any email server configured to block email from this list will never receive email from that range of IP addresses again. Take a few moments from your day and ensure that your website or email address is not being blocked. Any email coming from your website domain also has a corresponding IP address. An IP address placed on a temporary blacklist will have email coming from that IP address blocked for several hours.

What To Do When You Get Spam

Most often this link is simply a way for the spammers to identify your email address as valid. Sometimes the reply will not work because the sender's email address is a fake one and it will just bounce back to you as undeliverable. Now they can sell your address to other spammers and thank you for making their work easier by continuing to send you the spam you didn't want in the first place. Since the stated from address is usually a fake one, this is the most reliable way to track down the spammer's ISP, at the very least. Most pieces of email pass through at least four computers - the spammer's, their ISP, your ISP, and finally yours.

Is There A National Do Not Spam List?

The FTC also says emails and web sites that claim to offer a national do not email list or registry could be part of a high-tech scam to trick consumers into disclosing their email address or other sensitive personal information. According to the FTC, these web sites and emails may be a way to collect valid email addresses to sell to email spammers. If you have already submitted your email address to a national do not email list or registry that promises to reduce the amount of spam you receive, you may be a victim of one the latest email scams on the Internet. You may have already received a do not spam list email, seen a web site or even heard a radio advertisement that promises to reduce spam email just by submitting your email address. So the FTC is advising consumers not to submit their email addresses to any organization that claims to be creating a do not spam list.

How To Identify Spam

All that this may mean is that they bought your email address from another company with dubious privacy policies. Once your email address is in circulation with these companies, you are well on your way to a very nasty problem. Spam is the worst form of junk mail and a typical reason why many people have to change their email addresses. Even if you don't buy anything, they now know that your email address is connected to a live person and, if nothing else, can sell that address to someone else. These companies know that many email programs will sort the inbox by the earliest mail sent.

CAN-SPAM Basics

When you receive an opt-out request, the law gives you 10 business days to stop sending email to the requestor's email address. You must provide a return email address or another Internet-based response mechanism that allows a recipient to ask you not to send future email messages to that email address, and you must honor the requests. You cannot help another entity send email to that address, or have another entity send email on your behalf to that address. Finally, it's illegal for you to sell or transfer the email addresses of people who choose not to receive your email, even in the form of a mailing list, unless you transfer the addresses so another entity can comply with the law. Falsely represent themselves as owners of multiple Internet Protocol addresses that are used to send commercial email messages.

Learn Simple Strategies That Will Stop Spammers From Bombarding Your Inbox!

They also collect email address from address books found inside email software like Outlook or Eudora. The spam boots works in a similar way as web content collecting search engine spiders except they only collect email addresses. The downside of this method is that the email address is not clickable from your web site. The email address is then readable by human viewers, not by the spammers. One common solution is to rewrite the email address on the web site.

The Trouble With Spam Is....

This simply confirms to the spammer that your email address is active. Spammers rely on the widespread availability of email addresses and for people to reply to these emails or click on the links within the emails. For home users only distribute your email address to people you know and trust. If you have a work email address then just use it for work. Treat it as a throwaway account that you can use as a buffer between your true personal email address and the rest of the world.