What to do about suspicious emails
If you are running a business online and using email you are almost certain to get emails that look suspicious.
Some people want your money or attention, and are prepared to spam you to see if they can get it.
Here are a few resources that may help you if you are seeing suspicious looking emails. Overall, be sceptical about emails. If it looks suspicious, it probably is. Don’t click on links or attachments if you don’t know what they are.
Comment Spam
Sometimes spammers lodge a comment on one of your blog posts. They do this hoping the comment will be published so they get a link to their website. Even genuine sounding comments can actually be spam – check out the link associated with a comment, and if you are suspicious, delete it or mark it as spam. Detailed information on how to reduce/stop it here: How to Reduce/stop comment spam
Enquiry Form Spam
Spammers will also sometimes use your Enquiry Form to send you unsolicited email. As the email comes from your own website, you can’t really report this as spam.
It is annoying and not possible to stop this completely. You want to make it easy for genuine customers to contact you via your Enquiry Form, and putting barriers in their way will reduce the number of genuine leads. If someone is prepared to pay someone (probably not a lot) to take the time to fill out your Enquiry Form to offer you a cheap deal of some kind, you can’t really stop them. Just as you can’t stop hawkers walking in to your retail premises, or junk mail from landing in your letter box.
If you are using cForms, you can configure Visitor Verification (question / answer tests) and Captcha to reduce automated enquiry form spam.
Get your Website to #1 Spam
A variation of Enquiry Form spam, you’ll probably receive messages from helpful souls offering to get you #1 rankings on Google. If it was that easy, they would do it for themselves and make a killing with all their #1 rankings. Bottom line, valuable results usually require real effort to achieve.
Google’s Tips
Google have published some useful articles on the topic of suspicious emails and spam.
Domain Scams
Sometimes you may get ‘reminders’ for you to renew a domain name. Make sure it is from your own registrar, and that you aren’t getting a disguised invitation to transfer your domain to anothe registrar. Read the Scamwatch article on this: Domain Name Renewal Scams
Sometimes you may get a notification from a registrar reporting someone else has registered a domain similar to yours and they are just checking with you first to see if you want to register it first. If a domain is available, you can register it at your own registrar. This is a common style of domain scam email: We have received an application for a domain similar to yours …
