Why do you receive strange emails from your website?
Does this look familiar? Have you received a strange e-mail from your website, from a strange address and perhaps with many links?
What you’re looking at on the left is a screenshot of one such message.
It’s spam.
Unfortunately, spam is a side-effect of being ‘connected’ in any way to the Internet. If you have an e-mail address, it’s highly likely that you have already experienced some for of spam.
Having a website with a contact form is just as open to unsolicited e-mail as is having an e-mail address.
If your site is visible, spammers – or spam bots – will find it.
Click here for a definition of spam (the ‘what’, and the ‘why’)
What to do if you get spam
If you receive an e-mail similar to the one pictured above, FILLED with links – don’t click any of them, as many will lead you straight to viruses.
One of the addresses to avoid are those ending in @mail.ru (unless you’re doing business with anybody in Russia).
You can generally tell if an e-mail is not genuine. If you receive anything from mail.ru or any foreign domain (.pl for poland, .cn for china etc) then it’s generally a dead giveaway that it’s spam (if your company is not International and you have no dealing with people in any of those countries).
- be aware that spammers also use .com addresses
- spammers also use free addresses, such as yahoo, msn and gmail (to name but a few)
Spam is a global issue
There isn’t an effective solution to combat spam as yet (other than switching your computer off).
There are many anti-spam solutions available, but none of them are magic bullets.
Your website has a spam filter installed to combat spam, but it’s only as effective as the technology allows. Software updates will improve anti-spam mechanisms, but as yet, we’re always one step behind the spammers.
Why are spammers targeting you?
It’s highly unlikely that the spammer(s) you’re receiving e-mail from know you.
It’s not personal.
Spammers are not just targeting your website. They’re targeting hundreds and even thousands of other websites. They do so manually or with software that ‘crawls’ the Internet looking for e-mail addresses displayed on websites or for contact forms to auto-fill with a pre-written message.
- In some cases those messages are garbled text.
- Other times the spam messages contain dozens of links to other websites
Why are spammers doing this?
That’s a question that can only be answered by the spammer.
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