Contrary to the title, there is no foreseeable way to completely prevent all spam. It’s just something we’ll have to live with as long as we use the Internet to do business. In fact, even brick and motar businesses suffer from it by getting junk faxes alongside their junk mail.

In the case of list building, there are two kinds of spam. On one hand, you have your own emails to worry about–you have to make sure that the content of your messages are not being classified as spam in your user’s inbox. On the other hand, you have spammers that sign up to your site or newsletter in order to access your free downloads or to write bogus comments on your site to promote their useless junk.

Sending spam

I wrote a full article on email delivery rates discussing the importance of creating messages and newsletters that do not end up in your user’s spam boxes.

This is a vital step in preventing spam for your users and ultimately protecting your site’s reputation. If you’re sending messages being classified as spam, you’re also putting your ISP on the line because it’s their resources that y
you use when sending your email marketing campaign.

Receiving spam

To prevent getting spammers from your squeeze pages, you’ll want to implement anti-spam techniques such as the double opt-in procedure. This is when you have an email marketing signup box such as a newsletter where the user inputs their name email address. Shortly thereafter, the user will receive an email asking to confirm their subscription request.

Automated spam bots aren’t able to get through this procedure because they only know how to “sign up” much like spam bots that scour the Internet looking for email address to harvest are only able to send messages.

Another way to prevent automated signups is to require a CAPTCHA code on your signup box.

Proper email practices

Here’s a list of articles from the website BestPrac.org; a site that offers tips on how to help prevent spam worldwide.

• Squeeze page scammers
• Avoiding spam bots
• Email netiquette

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