I've written several articles about spam and how it wastes our time. I even wrote about a mistake I once made that caused me to waste several days.
Well today I want to share something I discovered, tested and found that it really does cut down on the amount of spam you have to delete in your site's email inbox. But before I tell you what it is I must tell you that all the hosting services I use use cPanel for site administration. So if your host uses something else you'll have to look around and see if your host allows you to do what I did.
Most hosting services give you a default email address for your domain when you create your account. And in an earlier tip I recommended that you create your own email address for those emails from your site visitors that you really want to read. By creating your own email address you were then able to separate the valid emails from most of the spam since most spam will end up in your default email inbox. (Your default email inbox will contain all the email sent to your domain except those sent to the email addresses you've created.)
Having most of your spam in an inbox that you know you don't need to read does save some time however you must still go into that inbox and delete them unless you want to re-live my mistake.
Recently I discovered a way to save the time I was wasting deleting all the email in my default inbox and here's how I did it:
- Create your valid email addresses. (Hopefully you've already done this but I'll list it again just-in-case.) If you don't know how to do this you can watch the free video provided by DiscoverCPanel.
- After you have your email addresses created, go back to your Mail Manager Menu. Below the link for "Add/Remove/Manage Accounts" you'll see a link for "Default Address." Click "Default Address."
- You now see the address where all the email that isn't going to the email addresses you've created will go. Below that information is a link "Set Default Address" and you need to click it.
- You now see where you can define the name for your default email address but before you do read the "Hint." I've included the important part of the hint here:
"Hint: You can enter :blackhole: to discard all incoming unrouted mail or :fail: no such address here to bounce it." - Enter this bolded text in the "to" box
:fail:no such address here
and click change. (Be sure to include the colons.)
After you've made this change you will no longer receive any emails that are not sent to the email addresses you've created and you will no longer have to go into your default email inbox to delete unwanted email.
Before I made this change I was receiving between 300 - 2300 spam emails every week for 1 of my hosted accounts and removing them took several minutes. It was so bad I was considering hiring someone just to delete the email in the default inboxes for my hosted accounts since I have several! But now I don't have to :-)
So if you're wasting time deleting spam from your domain's email accounts try doing what I did. Then let us know if it worked for you too by leaving a comment here.
To Your Success,
Susan
P.S. BTW, I have 1 hosted account where I never received any spam to my default email address. At HostGator they have turned the default email address feature off because...
"The Default E-Mail/Catch-All feature has been disabled by default due to it contributing large amounts of e-mail flooding from Spam."
So if you're using HostGator you don't need today's tip because you're using a great service that works hard to provide the services you need and to protect you from the things you don't want.
Tags: spam, delete spam, save time, default email address, how to stop spam
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