Every now and then I read interesting articles about Anti Spam products available in the market and most of the vendors claim they have 99% spam email filtering accuracy, most of the time they are correct, but have you wondered how spammers get your email address and how they are able to fill your support@yourcompanyname.com or contact form email mailbox with 4900 messages? If you are a administrator or a Webmaster for a small medium business here is your anti spam strategy, which you can implement in a day, I call this your first line of defense.

• Make sure you render all email addresses listed in your website as image files. Your web designer can help you here or you can encode your email address using JavaScript. You can also render email address as a text something like this Prakash (at) igotspam (dot) com. Avoid "mailto" html link to email addresses. You can also implement reCAPTCHA Mailhide to hide your email address. These techniques will help you to protect against Spambots crawling your website.
• If your are using blogging software like wordpress, typepad or moveabletype as your content management system you can always use Akismet to protect against comment form spam.
• If you have a old school comment form (in pre web2.0 world it was called as Feedback form), where a form submission is emailed to your marketing/sales team. Implement a Captcha plugin for your website's feedback form. You should do this to protect against automated feedback form submission by spambots. Check out captcha.net for implementation techniques.

The techniques discussed above are simple anti harvesting techniques, which will help you to control spam. I'm sure some of you might have implemented these and still receive Spam. In coming weeks I will discuss other harvesting techniques used by spammers and how to protect your mail servers against them. If you've got ideas, suggestions, questions or other ways to control spam please let me know by leaving a comment here.