One of the disadvantages of being a Web Developer / Sys Admin is that my email address is published on a lot of our websites. As we have over 4000 domains this means that I end getting quite a lot of spam!

Last week I had a few days off and when I got back on day four to check my email, I had about 3500 emails, most of which had to be spam. Outlook’s spam filter took care of about half and the few rules I’ve set for common, easily identified spam got rid of about a third of the rest. This still left me with over 1000 messages to sort through. Annoying…

After I’d done this I decided to take a two-pronged approach to making sure this didn’t happen again. First, I went to all our major sites and replaced every email address I could find on them with a peice of JavaScript that uses

document.write()

within a function to write the email address after the page loads. This should stop our email addresses from ending up on any more spam lists.

The next step was to take all the catch-all email accounts we have and instead of forwarding them all to my real email addresses, forward them to the best FREE Spam Filter in the world, Gmail. This allows me to run them through Gmail’s spam filter and then forward them on again to my real email account. Genius.

This second change means that I’ve gone from 200 spam messages getting into my Inbox every day to about a dozen. Perfick!

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 1st, 2007 at 1:17 pm and is filed under Email & Spam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.