We don’t tend to be too badly afflicted with email spam here at Daily.co.uk, but let’s face it, we’ve all had emails from those charming chaps who’d just like to borrow your bank account for a transaction or cause appendages you may or may not possess to reach improbable proportions.
So, here’s a tip that we use that should help keep things to manageable levels if you own your own domain name:
Reduce spam by removing catch-all forwarding
Daily Internet offers the facility for various permutations of email forwarding. You can forward individual addresses to one or more destinations, i.e. deliver mails sent to ‘sales@whateveryourdomainis.co.uk’ to all four members of your sales team and ‘bert@whateveryourdomainis.co.uk’ just to Bert.
It’s also possible to set up “catch all” forwarding for a domain name so that all emails sent to addresses which don’t have their own specific forwarding rules go to just one destination, for example anything sent to any combination of letters and numbers @whateveryourdomainis.co.uk could be set to deliver to a particular mailbox.
This can be an attractive option if you find people tend to guess at the correct address to use to reach you at your domain name. However, it also makes it easier for people sending spam email to reach you, as they will often send to addresses they think are likely to exist such as sales@, info@, admin@ and so on.
If you’re receiving lots of spam to different email addresses at your domain name, removing catch-all forwarding may help by preventing you receiving mail sent to be37xxxy@whateveryourdomainis.co.uk and the like. The trade-off is that you’ll need to make sure that all of the ‘real’ addresses you quote to people have mailboxes or forwarding set up so that you can continue to receive legitimate email as normal. This won’t make a difference if spam is sent to a genuine email address, but it does reduce the opportunities for spammers to find an address that will reach you so in many cases people see a drastic reduction in the amount of spam they receive.
Manage email on a domain with Daily.co.uk.
And finally… not all bulk email is spam!
Don’t forget that if you’ve done business with a company they might be sending you something it’s genuinely worth your while to read, such as a reminder to renew services which are due to expire. If you’re not interested in receiving news and offers from them you should be able to unsubscribe from future newsletter-style emails (if you’re a Daily Internet customer, you can opt whether or not to receive the Daily newsletter in the ‘Personal Details’ area of your My Daily control panel), but it’s best not to click your ‘Report spam’ or ‘Junk’ button.
By doing so, you risk getting the sender blacklisted so that yourself and others cannot receive important mails such as service renewal reminders. If it’s a legitimate company with whom you’ve ever done business (for example, you’ve purchased something from them, participated in a competition, registered on their website, or something along those lines), contact them directly if you’re not sure what to do about an email from them – legitimate companies, unlike spammers, don’t want to send you mail if you’re really not interested in what they have to offer so they should help you to unsubscribe.
