Email address horrors

When I first launched the new Blackad website in 2004, I wanted to make sure it balanced up decent copywriting with visibility on the search engines. One way of doing that is to put search terms into email addresses. You know, if you are a baked bean expert, your email address might be bakedbeanexpert@blackad.co.uk

I also wanted to filter enquiries from the website - so web copywriting courses would go to one email address, and consultancy enquiries would go to another address. You get the idea.

It got a bit out of hand.

There were around eight different email addresses on the website. And rather than set these up as separate accounts, I just had them funnel into my main email address - which acted as a catch-all account. That was fine for about a year.

But with the relentless march of spam, my inbox was getting clogged up with bad people who guess your email address. It's the same technique used by people who spam your free webmail account: they probably don't know your name, and instead just send out educated guesses of email addresses. If there's not a bighairyarmpit162@hotmail.com, here's bound to be a bighairyarmpit161@hotmail.com. Guess enough addresses and the spam will get through.

So I've just purged the email addresses on my website, and killed the catch-all address. If a nasty spammer tries to guess an email address on my domain, they'll get absolutely nowhere. And my inbox will be free again.

The good news is that the purge seems to be working. This morning I still received a little spam - eight emails - but my host's anti-spam sent them all to my spam folder. Hurrah.

My advice is this: don't have a catch-all email address on your website, and reduce to an absolute minimum the number of email addresses published on your site. It's good for customers too - they don't even have to think about where to contact you.

Which is the best reason of all for sorting the email addresses on your website.