Interview With Will Bontrager
"The best way to reduce spam in 2007 and beyond?"
"In 2007 and beyond what would you think to be the best way to reduce spam for site owners and webmasters? I'd like your answer to consider all aspects of email and how it might impact on a site owner and their online business - contact forms, contact via email, using email to subscribe to newsletters, email on forums, email spoofing, what to do when you get spam etc."
This is the question I recently asked Will Bontrager1 of WillMaster.com (the "Why and What and How-to-Do Techniques for Your Web Site") as part of a 4-question interview he agreed to give subscribers to his Possibilities Newsletter. And what follows is Will's answer. Admittedly, it didn't cover all aspects of email as I had somewhat ambitiously requested, but I believe it did address the fundamental issues to do with spam.) Enjoy.
Answer: Oh, my, Steve, you
don't ask for much, do you? <smiling>
I think there will be no one best way to reduce spam within reach anywhere in the near future. The reason is the many different avenues spammers use to get their spew delivered. Until spam is no longer profitable, delivery avenues will require unique approaches.
You can help make spam unprofitable by never, ever, responding to spam and doing whatever is necessary and appropriate to keep your friends and acquaintances from responding to spam.
Spam happens because there is money to be made by spamming. Spammers don't spam out of the goodness of their heart nor because of a benign desire to help people.
I'll address two common spam avenues, inbox spam and form spam.
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Inbox spam, first.
The best way to reduce personal inbox spam, or to avoid it altogether, is to have an unguessable email address and to keep it secret.
The most unguessable email address is a name portion (that part before the @ symbol) composed of a random series of letters and numbers, with hyphens, periods, and underscore characters intermixed. Like: ij.w398-4_0jdfs_d.ur-ei.da3@example.com
Now, I know you have a keen mind and undoubtedly are already thinking of the seeming impossibility of keeping an email address secret and still receiving email. And you also know if I didn't have a solution, I wouldn't have mentioned it.
The solution is a harvest-proof email link. Seriously, it can't be harvested through that system. Not ever.
You get a harvest-proof email link and publish it anywhere you want to let people send you email. They click on the link, write the email, and send it. Nowhere in that process is your email address revealed.
Now, you do have to provide the secret email address when you sign up for the server. That's so your email can be forwarded to you. But I know your email address is safe with the flow-to.com people. I know because the people are me and my wife, Mari.
Here is a harvest-proof email link to my own secret email address: http://flow-to.com/email/w1186083633lypxxgy.mth
Go ahead, click on it. Your email program will open and the "To" address will be pre-filled in with a one-time use, temporary address for sending your email to. (Actually send it, too, please. I would love to hear from you.)
But what happens when you respond to email, you might ask. Doesn't that reveal your address.
I don't respond from my secret address. And neither should you.
Make several addresses, each with different importance. In addition to the secret address, you might have a personal address and a vulnerable address. Your situation might warrant more.
The personal address would be used to answer email. The vulnerable address to subscribe to ezines and to answer iffy email.
The most important email address is, of course, your primary secret address, the one you never reveal. The next in importance is the address you respond from when you answer personal email. You'll be careful with that one, but it can still be compromised.
One way this email address can be compromised is by answering fishing questions. There are people who send out email with prompting questions like "what is your favorite color" and "are you sure you know what you're doing?" When you respond to email like that, chances are it is relayed directly to software that strips your address from the email and plunks it right into their "ready to spam" database.
That can be solved by not answering fishing email. If it's iffy, use your vulnerable address to answer from. Or, you may even send an email with a no-reply address using the system described in the A No-Reply Email Sending Form article.
Let outgoing email contain a note with your harvest-proof URL in case your email gets on spammers lists and you have to change addresses.
Now, form spam.
The best way to reduce form spam is to have forms impossible to be submitted automatically by robot software.
That one action alone can reduce form spam by 90% or more, maybe 100%.
Automatic submission prevention will not prevent manual form use by spammers. But even manual form use can be reduced to near zero with clever use of banned words, phrases, and IP addresses.
There is little software publicly available that will do all that. One of the best, if not the very best of the lot, is Master Form V4 -- which not only does an awesome job of preventing form spam, it is also a sophisticated form handler that may be all you'll ever need!
Some software must use its own forms. These would be forums, blogs, and other specialized software with the form being only one part of the whole.
However, Master Form V4 has been successful even there.
The technique is to make the form submit to Master Form V4, and let Master Form V4 submit the information to the specialized software. The monitoring layer provided by Master Form V4 is exactly what's needed to block spam.
[Interview END]
Notes:
- You can read the remaining answers to my Will Bontrager
interview at my brand new Squidoo
page dedicated to Will's answers
- And if you want to learn more about stopping spam then please do read my stop spam tips
(1) About Will Bontrager and the question I asked him. For those of you that don't know, Will Bontrager (together with his wife Mari) runs Willmaster.com, BontragerConnection.com and several other sites aimed at helping businesses large and small get the most from their websites. How? By providing great free and cheap software to automate, to provide interactivity and to provide site security. (If you've never taken a look around Willmaster.com you really should -you'll find excellent, well-supported software!)
Not only have I bought software from Will over the years but I am also a subscriber to his Possibilities newsletter too. Recently, Will offered to answer questions from subscribers if they agreed to post the answer on a free-to-access website for all to view. I couldn't resist this offer as I was particularly interested in Will's views on reducing spam - that scourge of the internet.
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