Information on setting up Email services

for small businesses with advice on dealing with spam and virus risks.

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Business Email Setup

business email setup When you have your own domain name you will probably also have a business email address (e.g. sales@yourcompany.com). Email sent to this address is delivered to your hosting company. You must use an email client to collect it.

An email client is a program that you use to handle your email. There are many email client applications around, for example Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express, which is free.

You must set your email client up so that it knows where to go to find your business email. To do this you supply it with the details provided by your hosting company for the email addresses that you have set up with them. It will then automatically log on to the Internet and at preset times check for new mail.

This is a bit like the US mail system where the mail man delivers the mail to your mail box on the street. It will sit there forever more unless you go out and pick it up.

When email is delivered to your email address it will sit on the mail server until your email client picks it up.

Business Email Spam and Viruses

spam and viruses A major consideration when you have a business website is whether or not you publish your business email address. If you do publish it be prepared to be deluged by spam much of which will be offensive.

The people who produce this spam distribute it randomly to millions of email addresses that they have collected from the Internet. they are not concerned if their explicit pornographic material arrives at the mail addresses of children or adults. It may also contain viruses that could embed themselves in your PC such that you may not even be aware of them.

The spammers "harvest" email addresses using software programs that automatically surf the Internet looking for addresses on websites. If your email address is available on your website make no mistake about it. They will find it and it will be added to the spammers lists.

Businesses large and small now have a significant problem dealing with this spam and you must take measures to minimize its effect on your business

Preventing Spam Email and Viruses

The only 100% effective way to prevent spam is to keep your email address hidden from the harvesters. Many websites are now accepting communications only through online forms, which email their submissions to the website owner. The computer coding behind this system ensures that the actual email address is never visible.

Even this method may not be sufficient. If someone on another website or business directory provides your details then the harvesters may find it there. If another site is providing links to your business you should ask them not to display your email address. A link to your website is sufficient.

You may also want to consider using email addresses that can be easily changed so that they can be scrapped when the spammers find them.

Form Spam

form spam It is also worth mentioning that spam can also be generate through certain types of online form. The spammers have ways of automatically finding forms and using them to submit spam to their owners. Usually this will consist of links to porn sites, adverts for replica watches and links to pharmaceutical websites. The object is to get you to click on the links when the form submission arrives in your in box. You should NEVER click these links.

One way of preventing this type of spam is to put a "validation" question on the form. This question should be one that only a human can can answer and if it is not answered properly then the form submission should be rejected. For example "what is 5 plus 9?"

You can then offer the answer to the question as an option on a pull down list. For those who are not so clever I select the options on the pull downs to make the answer really obvious. For example in the question above I may offer the following options,

Red
Abraham Lincoln
Coffee
Fourteen
Green
Scotland

We have found that this system works extremely well. It does not of course stop humans from manually spamming your form but not many of the spammers have the will to do this. Any submissions you do get are clearly from English speaking humans.

Links

http://www.projecthoneypot.org/how_to_avoid_spambots.php

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