Spam is unfortunately a fact of life on the internet, in July 2011 around 78% of all email consisted of junk messages. This figure has amazingly in the past been as high as 90%

Whilst there are a number of clever technical measures (such as ‘RFC-compliant HELO checking’) going on behind the scenes at the mail server level to reduce the amount of obvious spam that reaches your Blackfoot mailbox, there are also steps you can take as an end user to reduce your exposure.

1. Apply WHOIS privacy to your domain name.

If you have registered a .com/.net/.org domain name, then the email address supplied on registration will be published in the public WHOIS database. Spammers have been known to harvest these records. For customers who do not wish WHOIS details to be public we offer a ‘WHOIS protect’ addon for these domains at a cost of £10/year. This will place a set of generic contact details in the public WHOIS database rather than your own.

2. Be careful where you use your email address.

It is best not to post your full email address on your website / online generally as this can be easily harvested by spammers and their automated programs. Instead if you don’t have one already consider creating a contact form on your website, click here for further details.

Similarly when giving your email address to websites (such as when you sign up for newsletters), be careful to look out for any tickbox related to permission to pass your details to third parties as agreeing will often increase the amount of unwanted email you receive.

3. Setup forwarders for specific purposes.

Create your main email account and then consider creating disposable forwarders to it in the hosting account control panel for specific websites or purposes (forums@yourdomain.com popularauctionwebsite@yourdomain.com) should you find that one of your forwarders is suddenly receiving large amounts of spam, you can delete it and create another updating only those websites you wish to still receive messages from with the new value. This method can over time help you to avoid your main email address receiving large amounts of junk, whilst retaining the same main email address for your most important contacts.

4. Never click links in spam email.

Whilst legitimate newsletters from reputable organisations should always have an unsubscribe link or email address, clicking a link in an unsolicited / malicious message or replying to it can indicate to the sender that the email address is live and someone is looking at the messages, often leading to you receiving more spam. Similarly links in spam email can direct to malware which can silently harm your computer.

5. Never open files attached to spam emails.

As above, files attached to spam message can sometimes be malware or viruses. In the worst case opening a malicious attachment could lead to your computer itself being used to send spam. We’d advise always having up to date AntiVirus software installed, especially as some very good scanners are now available for free. Be aware however that even with AV installed, you are not 100% safe and should still exercise caution. If you receive an unsolicited email containing for example, a .zip file with purported new settings for Outlook, be suspicious!

6. Enable SpamAssassin

SpamAssassin (SA) is a feature included with every Blackfoot Hosting account and can be enabled in the email section of the hosting account control panel. When SpamAssassin is enabled, it will attempt to determine via a variety of measures whether an incoming message is spam and will assign it a score based upon it’s probability of being junk.

The Spam Assassin section of the control panel has some useful features

• Messages identified as spam can be delivered to their own folder (the spam box). You’ll need to subscribe to this new folder in your email client and empty it regularly.

• Once you’re comfortable that SA is not mistakenly classifying email you wish to receive, you could enable auto-deletion of spam messages (I personally prefer to empty my spam folder manually).

• If you wish to white list or black list certain addresses, this is possible in the SA configuration section.

If you are ever in any doubt as to whether an email you have received appearing to be from Blackfoot actually is, please feel free to forward it to support at blackfoot.co.uk and we will be happy to check this for you. A record of all emails sent by our billing system (welcome emails / invoices etc) is available within your billing account.