Make your email address harder to capture
- Use generic organizational
email addresses, not personal ones.
Use an address like Missions@yourchurch.org, not BettysPersonalEmail@cotmakers.com. Make the church email
addresses generic for the position, for example:
pastor@yourchurch.org,
music@yourchurch.org,
worship@yourchurch.org, etc.
This helps
reduce spam to personal mailboxes and helps protect against identity theft. It also makes transition easier when people
change staff or volunteer positions. The email address stays the same – you just force a
(strong) password change for the new person.
- Obfuscate your email
addresses.
This helps limit (though not eliminate) the ability of automatic programs (“bots”) to
“harvest” email addresses from your site.
http://www.healyourchurchwebsite.com/obfuscator/
- Make part of the displayed
address an image.
The disadvantage to this is that a visitor who has images
turned off or using a screen reader cannot determine what the address is.
Example: The email addresses on Avondale Pattillo UMC’s “Contact us” page:
http://apmethodist.org/contact.htm
- Avoid ordering from
unfamiliar sources on the web.
You never know which sites may be
selling your email address to spammers.
- Consider using a “throw-away”
email address.
Use it when ordering online, keep it until you start getting
too may spam messages, then delete it and get a different one. You can forward
any needed emails from that account to your normal church one.
Use safe email habits
- Don’t view email in a
“Preview” pane. That can automatically activate a malicious program,
including one that sends your email address to a remote computer.
- Don’t open attachments, even
from someone you know, unless you were expecting them. Malicious programs
can make an email seem to be from someone you know when it’s quite the
opposite. So what do you do? If the email is from someone you know, use
a separate message to email them and ask if they really sent the
attachment. And ask if they checked it for viruses first.
Check out some tips sites
Example: “How to stop spam”, http://gnwda.org/nospam.htm
