Spammers use tried and true systems to infiltrate email and database systems. Put simply, spammers don’t like change.
As a professional web developer and author of two blogs my email accounts intake over 500 email per day which is 1.8 million a year. When I add-up spam, newsletters, business and personal correspondence, blog comments, log file reports, contact submissions and other miscellaneous email, effective management is essential for productivity much less shear sanity.
Managing email in general boils down to a few over-arching concepts; filter, segment, change and simplicity.
- Microsoft Outlook Office updates populates your account with updated filters.
- Active filter systems such as CAPTCHA for form submission.
- Passive filter systems such as Akismet for blogs or Symantec for email systems.
Segmentation: divide and conquer.
- Within an email account, setup filters than drop email directly to folders based on subject, content, or email address.
- Use multiple email accounts. I have a spam account on yahoo that is purely there for companies to blast their indiscriminate email with no opt-out solutions.
Change: stay on your toes.
- Change your email addresses on a regular basis.
- Make web form process pages dynamic.
Simplicity: If it’s too difficult to manage, it’s not an effective system.
- Utilize all existing tools. Some utilities will cost, many are included within existing systems and others are available for free.
- Develop systems that address the obvious. Spammers don’t like change, so for example a system that changes the URL for a process page dynamically throws-off the spam bots. The magic to this system is that it doesn’t impede legitimate users.
What solutions have you found to be most effective? Are there any other over-arching concepts or rules-of-thumb you follow?
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