Many people believe that solving a spam problem can be accomplished simply by subscribing to an anti-spam service. However, it's typical for most domain owners to actually notice an increase in their spam problem as time goes on. Subscribing to an anti-spam service simply deals with that problem for you. Once you unsubscribe from the anti-spam service, you'll likely notice that you're getting even more spam than before.

Your spam problem doesn't go away simply by subscribing to an anti-spam service. If your anti-spam service blocks 99% of your spam, if the spam being sent to your domain doubles, you will notice that the amount of spam that reaches your inbox will double. The anti-spam service is still as accurate as it was before. Your domain is simply getting more spam.

There are steps that you can take to help slow down your increasing spam problem, and it is very important that you take these measures.

1. Subscribe to your domain name registrar's privacy service so that you don't have to list a public email address in your domain's WHOIS information. It's more important to do this for new domain name registrations than for existing ones.
2. Don't list any email addresses on your web site in plain text. Use a contact form, or hide the email address in an image (readable by humans but not by computers), and don't use a mailto hyperlink unless it's obfuscated by Javascript.

The CAN-SPAM act of 2003 only makes it illegal for spammers to harvest email addresses from your web site if your web site includes a notice that you don't grant them permission to do so. The notice should read "The operator of this website or online service will not give, sell, or otherwise transfer addresses maintained to any other party for the purposes of initiating, or enabling others to initiate, electronic mail messages".
3. Do not confirm your email address to spammers by viewing sourced images in their HTML emails or by being vulnerable to other embedded tracking methods.
4. Do not confirm your email address by replying or trying to unsubscribe from spam. Instead, report the spam to the spammer's ISP.
5. Be careful about who you give your email address to. Do not use your email address to enter sweepstakes, and tell others not to share your email address with free greeting card sites and other "email this to a friend" forms.
6. When asked for your email address by a new organization, make up an email alias just for them. For example, if your email address is john@yourdomain.com, you're signing up for an account with Walmart, and they ask you for your email address, create an email alias of walmartjohn@yourdomain.com that forwards to your email account. Then give them that address. If you start getting spam sent to that address, not only do you know who sold your email address, but you can remove that email alias to stop the spam.
7. Make sure that your email server has the capability to stop directory harvesting attacks. As a SPAMSteward customer, if you take advantage of our Mailboxes List feature, we can do this for you.