Email Best Practice #1

WebCoherence has concluded from its experiments that leading Email companies including Gmail (owned by Google), Yahoo Mail (owned by Yahoo) and Hotmail (owned by Microsoft) do NOT gratuitously circulate user email addresses to potential marketeers. It is often the users themselves who invite spam into their mailboxes because of their uninformed actions. WebCoherence, therefore, has recognized the need of educating users so that they improve their internet usage in order to attract less spam.

One of the key reasons for receiving spam is because users leave their email addresses on the public world wide web. They list their email addresses on websites, blogs and fora. These public places on the internet are readily accessible by crawler programs searching for live email addresses. Some companies collect email addresses in this way, selling them on to anyone willing to buy – spawning the spam.

If you wish to avoid spam, it is advisable never to leave your email addresses on the public world wide web. Of course there are times when you need to be contacted, and in such situations it is advisable either to leave a free ‘throwaway’ email address that you discard after having received the required reply, or to use the following format:

username [at] domainname [dot] domain extension

for example: John_Doe [at] webcoherence [dot] org

Or you could use other special characters:

John_Doe +@+ webcoherence +dot+ org

John_Doe {at} webcoherence {dot} org

Recipients find these alternative formats easy to understand, whereas most crawlers will overlook them. Consequently you can expect less spam.

Related posts:

1. Email Best Practice #4
2. Email Best Practice #3
3. Email Best Practice #2