Conquer SPAM with the Right Web Host Print E-mail
Anyone who has an email account does not need to get spam explained. It is the constant threat that chokes up your email account and probably wastes millions of gigabytes on bandwidth worldwide every day. And the more active you're using email communications, the more spam finds its way in. Many of us get even thousands of spam messages a day, so this is why it is very important to make sure that you conquer spam with the right web hosting company.

While user friendly tools and services are important to consider, email delivery and receipt is critical to your business. Therefore when picking a web hosting service, be sure to check whether they put appropriate measures in place to block spam. How well do they fight spam? Do they have firewalls in place to block spammers from abusing their servers? Do they have all libraries installed that are needed to integrate CAPTCHA controls into all your web forms?

The most essential one of these measures is the prevention of receiving spam. It sounds obvious, but it is still quite common - especially for cheap offers - that there is no spam protection at all. Your web host should not only prevent your email account from receiving unsolicited emails by any means, but also offering solutions to protect your website from being abused.

When your webhosting service comes with a control panel like cPanel, then it's usually your own responsibility to activate all the spam protection mechanisms. To prevent spam from reaching your mail box there is an email filtering system called SpamAssassin. Normally with most hosting packages SpamAssassin is disabled by default, so you've got to enable and configure it on your own. A detailed description on how to properly configure SpamAssassin would be beyond the scope of this article, but you should be able to find help by typing something like "spamassassin cpanel tutorial" into your favorite search engine.

While it is good to have a web host that is committed to protecting your account from being spammed, there is a downside of spam filtering. Often it happens that email that you actually want and need, is filtered out because of being mistakenly considered as spam. Even personal communications and one-on-one emails can be lost this way through over-eager spam control. According to an article in the Time Magazine, spam filters are blocking about 40% to 70% of all email communications. That's why it is essential for you to whitelist any sender from whom you want to reveive the emails.

Did it ever happen to you that a spammer was abusing your email address as the sender of spam mails? Think this isn't possible? Well, unfortunately it is ... and much simplier than you might expect it to be. The SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) which is the Internet standard for electronic mail transmission is a rather simple and old text-based protocol published already back in 1982. It allows to just put any email address as the sender of that particular mail and the protocol itself hasn't any control mechanism to avoid abuse.

Fortunately in response to the massive amounts of spams other methods of email authentication have been implemented. One of them is DKM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) which verifies that a message actually comes from the domain it claims to be. DKM uses public-key cryptography to electronically sign outgoing emails in a way that can be verified by the recipient. But again, DomainKeys are not activated by default and you need to enable this kind of authentication yourself if you intend to use it.

Another method of email authorization is SPF (Sender Policy Framework) which allows the receiving mail server to check whether the sending mail server is authorized for that particular domain name that's being used in the sender email address. To make use of SPF the owner of an Internet domain uses specially formated DNS TXT records to specify which IP addresses or server names are authorized to transmit emails for that domain. SPF often is already enabled by default, but it's always a good idea to double-check that it is in place and properly configured.

Finally a few tips helping you to avoid becoming a spam victim:

  • Do not use catch-all email addresses, you'll be bombarded with emails to phantasy names at your domain.
  • Never publish your email address on any page of your website, use CAPTCHA protected forms instead.
  • Do not use your primary email address for domain registrations, the best way to avoid spam is by using a domain privacy service.
  • Use throw-away emails if you don't want to disclose your email address on suspicious websites. There are already quite a number of free services out there - again just use your favorite search engine to find out more about disposable emails.