This week I discovered I had made a dumb mistake with 1 of my web sites...
probably the dumbest one I've ever made.
Think you can guess what it was?
Did I not back up my web site in case the hosting company lost everything?
Nope, that wasn't it.
Did I forget to encrypt my email address so it couldn't be harvested?
Naw, I know better than that?
Did I leave my login information where someone could find it or have an easy to guess password to make it easy for someone to hack into my site?
Been there, done that and have already learned my lesson.
Since you'll probably never guess what I did, I'll tell you.
You know the default email address you get with a hosted site? Well, I've got 1 I've never used and since I don't use it, I never check it.
That is, I never checked it before this week.
You see, a few years back I got a domain name and a hosted site that I've never really gotten around to using very much. Oh, I put some affiliate stuff on it so it wouldn't just be sitting dormant and I've occasionally uploaded products that I was selling since it has tons of space and I've tested and debugged scripts on it. But I've never really used the site for it's intended purpose.
Well this week, I ran out of space on this site so I started to do some housecleaning. First I removed all the old products I was no longer selling and some of the pictures I no longer needed. That didn't seem to do much so I decided to remove everything except for the 5 pages of affiliate stuff.
Imagine my shock when I still had no space on this site. A 500 megabyte site holding 5 web pages and totally out of space!
So I started checking everything. I checked the file structure - only 5 small web pages. I checked the database area - no databases were there. I checked all the packages offered by the hosting company - none were in use. In desperation, I finally checked my email account...
More than 23,500 emails and more than 400 megabytes of space used!
And every bit of this email is - SPAM - !
In other words, this is unwanted email sent to some undefined email address on my domain. (Remember, I never created any email addresses on this domain.) And every email sent to my domain ended up in my default inbox - the 1 I haven't been checking.
Now I am virtually out of space since this inbox is grabbing everything I free up as new spam arrives. And because it's already taken over my site, it's got to be removed before I can place a limit on the size of my inbox.
And if you think removing 23,000+ emails will take a lot of time, try doing it when it takes 20 minutes to remove 40 of them at a time. (40 is what the current page size is set at.)
Actually, it's not quite that bad any more since I've gotten it down to just over 20,500 using 276 MB so it's only taking about 10 minutes per page.
So here are my tips this week.
- Don't use the default inbox on your host as your real email address and inbox. If you do you'll have to sort through all the email to find the good ones.
- Even though you don't use the default inbox as your real inbox, go in and clean it out regularly. (I've been doing this on FriendsWhoCare and will be doing it on all my sites in the future. Fortunately, my other sites are newer and it only took about an hour to get them cleaned up.)
- See if you can set a limit to the amount of space used by your email accounts. If you can, set it to something appropriate for the amount of space you've got. Since I've got 500 MB on this site, 10% should be sufficient if I really expected any email. Since I don't, I'll set it for the smallest amount possible.
I hope after you've read this you'll check any inboxes you don't use regularly before it's too late. Learn from my experience and don't make my dumb mistake of thinking that if you don't use an email inbox, no one else will.
To Your Success,
Susan
Tags: email, spam, spam email, junk mail, internet marketing mistake
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