A common nuisance that plagues site owners, is spam in its many forms.

If you are receiving a considerable amount of spam on a daily basis, the first thing you might want to do is make sure you have not listed your email address publicly, or on your website as a mailto: link.

Being aware that is is a bad practice to place your email address, or a mailto: link on your website, many people opt to place a contact form instead.

This does reduce the amount of spam you receive in your inbox, however, some clever spammers use bots and other techniques to send you spam through your contact forms. This is a serious problem, as blocking email from your own server, would result in nobody being able to send you messages via. your website!

Some site owners also enable ‘commenting’ features, that for example, allow any individual to start a conversation about a blog post, or page on the website. Spammers often abuse this ability as well.

So how do you deal with these spammers? The best way is to enable spam protection in the software you install on your site, and even though we have added some additional protection server-wide, we suggest you still do. For example, in WordPress, there is many options to enable ‘blacklist’ monitoring, such as Akismet.

But, to help reduce the effort required to squash these spammers, we’ve added server-wide application firewalls, and a new blacklist monitoring tool that will give known offenders a 403 error when they attempt to access your sites. We have initially set the requirements to block at this level fairly high, which roughly works out to the offending IP sending 10,000 or more spam (or other malicious activity) recently. This virtually eliminates the possibility of false positives.

If you yourself, or a legitimate user are receiving 403 errors on your website, you may need to check your systems and network for malware that may have resulted in your own IP being listed on these blacklists. You can also reach out to our support team, and provide us your IP, so that we can give you more detailed information as to what is occurring.