Increase in spam

Do you list your email address on your website?

One of the main ways spammers get email addresses is from websites. They use "spambots", programs that crawl web pages and collect email addresses to build mailing lists for unsolicited email. Spambots can collect addresses from websites, newsgroups, special-interest group (SIG) postings and chat rooms.

If you list your email address on your website or elsewhere on the internet and your spam went up, spambots most likely collected it. We recommend removing your publicly shown email address right away to stop more spambots from collecting it.

A safer way to let visitors contact you

Ask your web designer to build a contact form with a captcha and hide your email address. You can then route the form securely to your Enguard address. If visitors will enter personal information or anything classified as Patient Health Information, you should also get an SSL Certificate for your website.

If spam has already gone up a lot

If you already see a big jump in spam, the damage is likely done. The spambots or spammers that got your address can keep adding it to new spam lists forever. Often, by the time a spam server is blacklisted, it is already too late for our spam filters (or any spam filters) to block it.

If you are a victim of a spam attack

1. We can turn on "greylisting" for your account. Greylisting blocks a message on the first attempt and forces it to be sent again later. Spam servers normally send a message just once, so this is very effective. Real email servers retry several times before giving up. The downside is that every real sender is blocked at first too, so their emails to you are delayed on the first try. When a message is delivered the second time, we whitelist their IP address for 36 days, and during that time they can email you without delay.
2. Set up a content filtering rule in webmail to block all incoming email, then add allowed senders one by one. You must keep this list up to date, or many messages will bounce. You also risk missing important messages from people you did not add in time.
3. Change your email address. This stops all the spam, and real senders get your new address. If you guard the new address carefully, you will hopefully not be hit again.

Please contact our support team if you think your account is the target of a spam attack. If yours may be compromised or is unusable because of the spam, use another email address to contact us.

One-off spam messages in Webmail

Besides keeping your email address off websites, you can adjust your own spam filtering for single messages. In most cases that is enough. Right-click any message and choose to mark it as spam and block the sender.

For stubborn spam, contact us via email and include all of this:

1. Which address is receiving the spam message?
2. What is the sending address of the spammer (what does it appear to be)?
3. When was the most recent instance of this spam (day, time)?
4. What is the message subject?
5. Do not forward the spam to us. We will not open it.
6. Do not delete or open the spam message. Flag it and move it to your Junk E-Mail folder instead. We can possibly look at the message code and header information to help you find and block its source.