If you are anyone else, these days you are almost getting to the point of just not even checking your email anymore. Spam is at an all time high, and to check your email means going through mountains of spam. I've talked to some people getting sick of 20-30 messages a day, but those are just the lucky people. I have also personally witnessed accounts that will download as many as 300-400 a day or even more. The only reason that spammers continue sending out so much junk that you have no desire to download, is that it works. It's sad to admit that, but people actually click those advertisements.
How am I opting-in For spam?
Well that's simple enough in it's on respect. If you have a website, you are probably more than familiar with a desire for Bots such as Google, Yahoo and MSN to visit your site, crawl over all your pages. Hoping that one day they decide to hoist your site up on their shoulders placing your pages on the top of the results. In turn there is always a balance. The Ying to the Yang, for if there is Good, then Evil lurks around the corner.
Spammers use bots as well. All they do is crawl sites, reading them looking for email addresses to add to their databases. Looking for contact forms that can be exploited. Finding email addresses hidden within the code of a website. And then they recoil into the darkness, only to return spewing millions of horrible, unwanted junk messages into everyone's email account. Spammers are horrible individuals, and they will take advantage of you. Look at it this way, would you consider leaving your Social Security card under your car's windshield wipers, just in case someone banged into your car they would know who's car it was? It doesn't matter if even most of the people online are legitimate people like yourself, but it's the 1% of scavengers that always worry me.
Well that's simple enough in it's on respect. If you have a website, you are probably more than familiar with a desire for Bots such as Google, Yahoo and MSN to visit your site, crawl over all your pages. Hoping that one day they decide to hoist your site up on their shoulders placing your pages on the top of the results. In turn there is always a balance. The Ying to the Yang, for if there is Good, then Evil lurks around the corner.
Spammers use bots as well. All they do is crawl sites, reading them looking for email addresses to add to their databases. Looking for contact forms that can be exploited. Finding email addresses hidden within the code of a website. And then they recoil into the darkness, only to return spewing millions of horrible, unwanted junk messages into everyone's email account. Spammers are horrible individuals, and they will take advantage of you. Look at it this way, would you consider leaving your Social Security card under your car's windshield wipers, just in case someone banged into your car they would know who's car it was? It doesn't matter if even most of the people online are legitimate people like yourself, but it's the 1% of scavengers that always worry me.
What good is my email address if I can't advertise it?
This is a very good question. When I first start talking about how easy someone has made it for spammers to get their email in the first place, this is normally their first response. Here's the thing, you don't have to advertise your email address to allow people to email you. It's your email address if you want to be choosy about the email it receives then start being choosy about how you give it away.
Your Email Address should never be displayed anywhere on your website. It should not be a part of a "mailto:" link for any contact link. It should never be added in a hidden input field on a form. All of these methods guarantee that you will receive lots of spam. The best method of securing your address, but still allowing good email to come through is to use server side scripting.
I know for some that seems like a scary phrase, but to be honest it is not all that scary. All you need to do is find one of hundred's available free scripts available online. There's a form mail perl script that stores your email address in the script, the visitor can never see it, but still sends you email through your contact form. You could also look for a PHP script that stores the email address. ASP is also server side. As long as the script that is not accessible by the visitor stores the email address, then you'll still get the email, but spammers don't.
Good Luck.
This is a very good question. When I first start talking about how easy someone has made it for spammers to get their email in the first place, this is normally their first response. Here's the thing, you don't have to advertise your email address to allow people to email you. It's your email address if you want to be choosy about the email it receives then start being choosy about how you give it away.
Your Email Address should never be displayed anywhere on your website. It should not be a part of a "mailto:" link for any contact link. It should never be added in a hidden input field on a form. All of these methods guarantee that you will receive lots of spam. The best method of securing your address, but still allowing good email to come through is to use server side scripting.
I know for some that seems like a scary phrase, but to be honest it is not all that scary. All you need to do is find one of hundred's available free scripts available online. There's a form mail perl script that stores your email address in the script, the visitor can never see it, but still sends you email through your contact form. You could also look for a PHP script that stores the email address. ASP is also server side. As long as the script that is not accessible by the visitor stores the email address, then you'll still get the email, but spammers don't.
Good Luck.
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