stopping spam

Everything to do with using your own website to advertise your rental property. Design, usability, hosting, getting listed on the search engines, optimising your site, pay-per-click, etc, etc.
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tansy
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Location: La Manche, Normandy, France

stopping spam

Post by tansy »

This probably sounds a naive question - but since being active on the forum the level of disgusting and revolting emails has increased dramatically.

I understand that whilst online your computer gives of a signal that these weirdos can pick up...what advice do the techies amoungst you give to block this signal being picked up...in laymans language please :wink: otherewise I won't understand and then go into sleep mode :roll:

thank you in anticipation.
A-two
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Location: USA

Not from this website

Post by A-two »

Tansy,
It's not coming from this site. There's no way here to find out your email address to send the spam. Think about where else you signed up recently and go back and check whether your email address appears anywhere on their website pages. If it's any consolation, I'm getting about 100 of those a day. It comes with the territory unfortunately.

All the best,
Joanna
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paolo
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Post by paolo »

Tansy,

I don't think it would be anything to do with the forum. You don't emit your email address just by being online. Your address has probably been added to a spammer's list of verified email adresses.

Perhaps you gave it out when you bought something online. Or you replied to a spam email, even to 'unsubscribe'. Or I believe that even opening a spam email that contains a graphic can tell the sender that you opened it, and therefore your address is a 'live' one. Then you will get lots of quality spam!

I'm not very clued up on this, but as Joanna says, it does come with the territory.

Incidentally, whenever I buy anything online, or have to give an email address to use a service, I use a free Hotmail or Yahoo address, so that any ensuing spam does not get into my real inbox.
Paolo
Lay My Hat
sleekitbeastie
Posts: 45
Joined: Thu Dec 02, 2004 10:04 am

Reducing spam by hiding e-mail addresses

Post by sleekitbeastie »

A lot of spam is sent to e-mail addresses harvested from web sites. Google et al are not the only ones who trawl the web looking for interesting information. It is not a good idea to have your e-mail address in plain view. I looked at Joanna's site and there was a plain link to her e-mail address. This will ensure that she receives spam.

There are several methods of disguising an address so that automatic searching won't find it. The trick is not to have the keys that the searchers look for. In Joanna’s site you can see 'mailto:xxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.com' (x replaces real contents to stop spammers using this reference!). Both the ‘mailto:’ and the commercial at (@) suggest that here is a useful e-mail address.

Replace the entire link with a script like this:

<script language=javascript>
<!--
var contact = "aaa"
var email = "bbb"
var emailHost = "ccc"
document.write("<a href=" + "mail" + "to:" + email + "@" + emailHost+ ">" + contact + "</a>" + " ")
//-->
</script>

This will look just the same on the page but doesn’t offer the same clues to the baddies. Replace aaa with the text you want in your link, bbb with the bit of your e-mail address before the commercial at and ccc with the bit of your e-mail address after the commercial at. The commercial at is still visible but even that could be replaced as:

<script language=javascript>
<!--
var contact = "aaa"
var email = "bbb"
var emailHost = "ccc"
document.write("<a href=" + "mail" + "to:" + email + String.fromCharCode(64) + emailHost+ ">" + contact + "</a>" + " ")
//-->
</script>

Of course a really clever searcher could work out that this is a hidden e-mail link – but generally it is easy meat that they are after. Unfortunately it takes time for spammers to drop your address once they have picked it up. Hide addresses in web pages and spam should reduce - eventually.
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tansy
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Post by tansy »

Thank you all for your replies. So are you saying it would help if I don't hit the unsuscribe button re viagra and all the other drugs on offer!

That is the only thing I have done or order flowers through Interflora....quite an innocent little soul really!

I am with Wanadoo.fr - my problem is that everything comes through in French re their firewalls etc...it's quite hard to phathom at times, we have got very strong software on my imac cube...but I'm sure we are behind the times here even with this precaution.
sleekitbeastie
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Post by sleekitbeastie »

tansy wrote: it would help if I don't hit the unsuscribe button re viagra and all the other drugs on offer!
I'm not sure if you are saying this as a joke... If you are not then you should be aware that this is not a good idea. Up to that point the spammers only think they have a possible e-mail address. The moment you respond (by trying to unsubscribe) you confirm that the address is valid and that you do pick up your mail. Never, ever, ever respond to spam however much you want to rip the heart out of the barbarians that send it. Apparently the world centre of spam is Florida from where most of the vile proliferations emmanate - seemingly it's all part of the fight for democracy.
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paolo
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Post by paolo »

Welcome to the forum, Sleekitbeastie!

Tansy,

Say it ain't so!? :)

Never, never, never 'unsubscribe' to spam - you are only subscribing to tons of it!
Paolo
Lay My Hat
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tansy
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Location: La Manche, Normandy, France

Post by tansy »

No I didn't know...the only one I unsubscribed to was a (well I'm fairly sure) a genuine company. The others I have been deleting without opening....but thank you I surely know now!

Yes I had heard that Florida was the hub...it went all quiet during the hurricanes...what sort of people are living there?

I am getting around 8/10 a day - is that about normal?
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livinginitaly
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Spam, Spam, Spam

Post by livinginitaly »

Sadly, spam is pretty much a 'fact of life' for anyone 'connected' nowadays.

It's commonplace to have to enter your email address to access many forums or to register with many 'content' sites, here's a 'trick' i've come up with.

Whenever i register anywhere new, i alwasy use the 'sitename' as the front part of my email address. For example, I registered with this forum as 'laymyhat@xxxxxxxxxx.com' (no offence Paolo! :) ).

The main aim of this is that should i ever get spam sent that contains a 'prefix' to my domain name at least i'd know who to complain to. However, since i've been doing this (about 18 months) i've never had spam from any of the sites i've 'signed up' with. In my opinion, some of these sites have been very dubious, such as download sites for 'software drivers' and 'trial software', so my guess is they 'strip out' any emails that contain their site name. No proof of this, but no spam means something is working right :)

Obviously this only works if you have your own domain name with 'unlimited' email forwarding, but this seems the 'norm' now.
sleekitbeastie
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Joined: Thu Dec 02, 2004 10:04 am

Normal spam quote

Post by sleekitbeastie »

I'm not sure what is normal these days. My partner and I used to get about 200-300 daily - we both work via the internet and I had not disguised e-mail addresses on the various web site. I set up our own domains - spammers like popular domains and are disinclined to put the effort into unknown ones. I also cleaned up and disguised addresses on the web-sites. Between the dozen personal and business mail addresses we now get only about two or three spam messages a week. Our wanadoo.fr addresses are very occasionally spammed. Our main business addresses are almost never spammed - there is an unfortunate error in the British Hanoverian Horse Society web site which has an erroneous reference to one of our private sites which took me ages to track down. Our gîte business addresses are occasionally spammed - mostly by far eastern clothing manufacturers - but these have dropped away to almost nothing. I haven't been offered viagra or manhood improvements for a month or so – I’m not sure what that says about me. It was hard work cleaning up the act but it seems to have done the trick. We also now include an identifier in all e-mail addresses we give to reputable clients etc (i.e. an address given to Microsoft would be me.microsoft@mycompany.co.uk) and use freebies for the junk sites and obvious collectors. The only problem is remembering all the odd addresses we have given out.
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paolo
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Post by paolo »

Whenever i register anywhere new, i always use the 'sitename' as the front part of my email address. For example, I registered with this forum as 'laymyhat@xxxxxxxxxx.com'
That's a good tip. And if that address does get on a spamming list, you can filter all emails sent there straight to the trash.
Paolo
Lay My Hat
Christine Kenyon
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Post by Christine Kenyon »

WE used to get lots of spam (and interestingly there is now a "spam it up" advert on British TV for the original meaty version of spam!) but we've managed to avoid most of it by using the "spam-stopper" provided by our service provider, globalnet. This means that 99% of the emails don't get as far as our individual email addresses. We simply go onto the email section of the globalnet website, transfer all the obvious spam emails to the trash can and bin them without opening them.

Mind you, you have to do this fairly regularly. It can be interesting to see what entirely innocent emails get caught in the spam detection process. So far we've only had one bona fide enquiry that globalnet didn't like.

Hope this helps, Tansy. I'm sure there are other ways of getting supplies of Viagra!

Christine

PS: On a similar thread, we used to get lots of junk faxes. And as our fax machine is linked to our telephone, we were regularly being woken up in the middle of the night thinking there was a family crisis - only to find we were being offered second hand vans or special ring tones. One fax to the fax preference service stopped this almost immediately. Let me know if you want the fax number. I think it only works in the UK.
A-two
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Location: USA

Re: Reducing spam by hiding e-mail addresses

Post by A-two »

sleekitbeastie wrote:I looked at Joanna's site and there was a plain link to her e-mail address. This will ensure that she receives spam.
Now I'm really confused. Are you sure it's my site? www.propertyangels.com I used to have what I call a plain link, which is our email address spelled out on the website, but now I use only hyperlinks, such as the "contact us" button on the top menu bar. Are you saying that the spiders can read these?

I'm a real newbie at Dreamweaver and built our site using a template in design view. Are you telling me to go in to the code view and replace the email hyperlinks with this jarva code instead?

Like most, I have numerous email addresses and stress that most of my spam is not coming from this email address, only one or two a week. However, I don't want to see it increase, so keen to fix the problem.

Thanks,
Joanna
sleekitbeastie
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Post by sleekitbeastie »

Joanna wrote:Now I'm really confused. Are you sure it's my site?
I'm afraid so. If you load your web page in a browser and click view source you can search for the link 'contact'. You will see:

<a href="mailto:your mail address">contact us</a>

Again I have removed the actual address.

Replace the whole bit with the java code. Obviously try this in the safety and comfort of your own home to prove that it works! The search engine (and spammers bots) search the code. Spammers see 'mailto', parse the next bit, it looks like an e-mail address (because it is) and it's off to Florida with it.

Hiding the address will have no immediate effect and may not work at all if the address is already out there, but it's easy and free.

I don't know which of the steps I took actually worked in reducing spam but I have reduced it massively ... so far ...

In practice I think it is a continual and continuous battle. The real battle is to get the US government to see spam as the form of piracy that it is rather than a legitimate tool of free trade and to legislate against it.
Darren
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Joined: Tue Nov 09, 2004 5:56 am

Post by Darren »

I hope this gives you some ideas to help combat SPAM.
Combating SPAM

Everyone who communicates on the internet via email has the same old problem of SPAM and it’s becoming more apparent that the recent unsolicited commercial emails (UCE) laws implemented in the US and Europe are not having an impact.

Did you know that over 60% of SPAM is from the US? I was quite surprised by this fact.

So how can we combat this problem - I am sure the majority of you will have this problem, many of you will be advertising on websites who do not hide your email address, some of you will participate in forums, or have your own website.

Professional spammers use software called “Harvesters� which scans websites and gathers millions of email addresses, that is why it is important that you protect your email address and do not display it on forums, websites or divulge it to websites which do not have a privacy statement.

There are a number of ways where you can protect yourself.

Set up free email accounts

Use an email address from a free email provider, ( Hotmail and Yahoo) that way if spammers do get hold of it you can report it as SPAM and quite easily create a new account. I have a number of email accounts that I use for subscribing to newsletters, emailing friends and family and one for entering competitions etc.

Create an HTML form

Rather than displaying your email address on your website you could instead create a HTML form where the email address is hidden and visitors complete the form and the results are sent to your email address - if any of you need any assistance on setting this up, just drop me an email. If I get a big response I will publish a guide to setting this up in a future issue of the newsletter.

Many holiday rental companies do not know how to set up a form on an enquiry page, if the holiday rental company you advertise your property on does not have this facility and your email address is displayed for all to see then contact the company and get them to look into this.

SPAM software

You can download software which will scan your email before it enters your email software, like Outlook, you can then block any email coming from that email address, IP address or domain name. That way when emails come in from the blocked sender they never appear in your Outlook inbox. I bought some software called Mail Washer, it’s easy to use and doesn’t cost much. If any of you use software to combat SPAM, then let me know and I’ll publish this in the next newsletter

Spam blocking websites

I am not too familiar with this type of blocking, but you can subscribe and enter your email details on to a secure website - all emails sent are directed to this website, and the sender has to click on a link before it is sent to your inbox. On some of these websites you can either deny or accept emails from the sender, and all rejected emails are sent to the blacklist folder.
Another idea - create a small image the same colour as your background and add your email address in text on top of the image - place the image on your site, people can then type out the email address, and it's not shown in the HTML code, which is how harvesters get your email address.
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