Spam’s Going Down

There are a few people getting hammered by spam at my church and a few months ago, I started doing some things to be proactive to go after it. As is the case, usually, when resources are tight, solutions become more creative and that becomes the solution to this story.

To set the stage, our website was a certain URL and of course, the email addresses had the same domain. That was fine but the URL was not good and probably about a year ago, we got a new one that is more appropriate. (FYI – a URL with a dash in it is less than ideal, a URL with 2 dashes in it is worse) At some point, everyone got a new email address with the new domain and the old email address remained intact, as well.

Recently, a handful of people were getting hammered with spam. A little investigation revealed that their spam was coming to their old email addresses, so the first attempt was to delete the old email address. It wasn’t being used anyway. This worked for 4 out of 5 and, no, they weren’t even dentists! One person continued getting slammed, so I knew something more drastic needed to be done.

It’s time to introduce the next element, lack of consistency with email addresses. Some were firstname, some were firstnamelastname, some were firstinitiallastname. Actually, that’s the way they all still are. Consistency is king when it comes to enterprise-wide email addresses, in my opinion. I’ve had it in my mind for awhile to make the email addresses consistent, but the question becomes, what is the standard? There are several choices but my preference is firstname.lastname@… I don’t know why, it’s just what I like and what I’m used to and that’s what everyone is getting.

The third element is eliminating spam. I don’t want to make it less or make it bearable or get it down to one or two a day, I want it gone! Knowing the spam comes from signing up with your email address on certain sites and also having your email address listed on a site, plus knowing my funds are limited, plus knowing it’s not practical to expect people to stay off the internet, here’s the solution that I have come to.

Each person will have 2 email addresses, one is for professional use with people. Friends, family, colleagues etc., a person.That’s your firstname.lastname@ email address. Your secondary email will be for when you sign up for a newsletter or need to register at a site. That is your firstinitiallastname@. Then, if when spam rears it’s ugly little head again, I just need to eliminate the secondary email and create a new one.

I’ve got about half the users setup so far and I hope to finish adding the rest of the new email addresses tomorrow. Then, I’ve got to do some documentation and give the users about a month lead time to notify contacts and change where newsletters are sent.

The goal is to convert at year end. It should be fun. By the way, I set the problem child up this way and last I knew, no spam whatsoever!

It should be an adequate solution, but we all have to do our part and don’t use the main email address on the web. Time will tell how that will work out.