Website Security

SSL Certificates

If you wish to have a secure site you can purchase an SSL Certificate. This is essential if you accept credit cards over your web site. The only scenario where it would not be essential is if you use a third party merchant account like PayPal. In this case when someone makes a payment they are transferred over to another site that is already protected by an SSL Certificate.

An SSL Certificate may also be considered if you are asking for sensitive information such as a social security number through a form on your web site.

Email Spoofing

It is called email spoofing when someone uses your email to send spam to someone else.

There are only two ways to spoof emails.

1. The spammers get a hold of your web hosting account password and use your control panel to send spam from. THIS IS VERY UNLIKELY since anyone from any computer can use your email to send spam without even touching your web hosting server or your web site.
2. Someone just uses your email address from their server to send out the spam. THIS IS THE MOST LIKELY thing to happen due to the fact of how easy it is to do.

"To put it simply you can equate emails to regular US mail you send and receive from your mailbox for your house or apartment. Address spoofing is like intentionally writing the wrong return address to the envelope. Email relaying is like taking that envelope and walking down the street to a public mail drop and dropping the letter in. When the mail man comes to pick up the mail, he has very little idea of who sent it, and cannot verify that the return address on the envelope is the correct return address. Anyone can do it, and almost no one ever gets caught."

What can be done to help stop this from happening to you?

You can visit this link for details.

Email Harvesting and Stopping Spam

Email harvesting is the act of a 'robot' visiting your site scanning the html code for mailto: and harvesting any email address after it. We help prevent this from happening by cloaking all of our clients email addresses for free. Also, upon request we can set up a 'junk email address' for you to use if you are forced to enter an email address in a questionable site. This would be a junk email address where you don't care what comes to it and only need to click on a 'verification link' for web site submissions and such.

Even though this isn't 100% effective it can mean the difference between 200 spam emails in a day to 2 spam emails in a day. Here are some additional tips to help cut down on spam.

• Use your junk email address in questionable circumstances
• Be careful about leaving your good email address in places you visit such as forums, shopping sites, etc.
• Use multiple email addresses for different situations to help you quickly identify theme or source of emails. For example you can use on strictly for business, another one for personal, another one for marketing your web site only, etc.
• Apply filters to your email using your email software and/or provider.

Follow this link for more ideas and details.