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Spam and computer viruses can become a major
problem if you don't manage them properly. One way to avoid
both of these nuisances is to use contact forms on your web
site instead of e-mail links.
A common practice for spammers is to use e-mail
address harvesting software to "crawl" the web searching
for websites that contain keywords relevant to their marketing.
They grab e-mail address links from websites and add them
to their mailing lists. Often times, these lists are then
sold to other spammers. Many times they don't even grab legitimate
mailbox addresses. They might simply add you to the list with
their best guess such as yourdomain@yourdomain. Filtering
through hundreds of e-mail messages every day just to find
a few messages from customers can waste a lot of your time
AND your chances of receiving computer viruses are increased
dramatically.
A solution is to eliminate e-mail links on your
website and reject messages that are not addressed to a legitimate
mailbox. Instead of e-mail links, use a contact form. This
way, the initial contact is buffered from spammers and hackers.
Once you have established communication with your customer,
you can reply via e-mail and they can reply to your message
and save your e-mail address to their address book. You can
also use a script such as FormMail with an autoresponder to
automatically reply to messages that are received in your
contact form. The auto-reply can include your e-mail address
and a link to your contact form in the body of the message.
We can set up a contact form and FormMail for
you. Also, FormMail is one of the services included in WebTools.
For a free initial consultation, Contact
us.
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