Cosmetic Surgery Advertising and Dealing with Spam

Spam seems to be unavoidable. Nearly everyone gets it regardless of the fact that everyone seems to hate it. There are, however, some things that you can do to help reduce the amount of spam that you receive through your plastic surgery website.

The first step in decreasing your website’s amount of spam is to remove the ‘catch all’ setting with your web hosting company. This setting collects all email sent to any address with your domain name, as in anyaddress@myplasticsurgerypractice.com. This could be joe@myplasticsurgerypractice.com, mary@myplasticsurgerypractice.com, bozo@myplasticsurgerypractice.com, and so on. All mail sent to any address ending in @myplasticsurgerypractice.com is then sent to you, which can result in a great deal of spam. When you remove this setting, it’s important that you provide those email addresses that you do want mail sent to, such as info@myplasticsurgerypractice.com. You can always add more email addresses as needed, just keep in mind that the more addresses you have, the more spam you will likely receive.

Another step is to set up filters in your email program which automatically move messages meeting certain criteria that you set into the delete or trash folder. You will still be allowed to scan this folder to see if there are any valid messages that aren’t actually spam. When setting the criteria for your filters, you choose words that are commonly found in spam. Be careful with this because some words may also be found in valid messages. Further, filters often make it difficult for you to receive e-zines that you may have subscribed to.

Yet another option for reducing spam is to provide a form on your site through which you can be contacted. This form allows visitors to your site to type in their name, e-mail address and a brief message. As of yet, your email address cannot be taken from the form by software that harvests email addresses. Another way to keep your email address from being harvested is to use JavaScript. However, this can cause a potential problem as people with JavaScript turned off will not be able to use this feature.

The most important thing when it come to the fight against spam is to stay on top of it. Spammers tend to be a creative bunch and eventually find their way around those measures used to combat them. So keep current with your anti-spam efforts and you’ll hopefully keep one step ahead of them.