Never send bulk emails to your clients using the To: or Cc: field. This then displays everyone’s email address to everyone else in the list. Firstly that’s like sending a photocopy of your entire client list to everyone else in it, every time you do it.
Secondly, once an email address is listed in this way on someone else’s computer, when their computer get infected by a particular type of virus, it will scan the entire computer for anything that resembles anything like an email address (whether there’s been direct communication between the two people or not), and then store all these email addresses on a big database, to be sold on for fractions of a pence each, many times in the future. Whenever you send bulk emails, use the Bcc: field instead (Blind Carbon Copy), as this will only show to that recipient, the address of the sender, those in the Cc: field, but no-one else in the Bcc: field (it actually gets sent in such a way, the big list of email addresses for your bulk mailout usually don’t even appear in the source code of the email.
All email programs have the Bcc field, although sometimes it’s hidden by default. A quick search on the web will tell you how to show it again.
Train your staff on how they can personally help to minimise spam (directing them to the page above if you like, or you can access a host of books and educational matter on the subject on the web, or at your local bookshop).
When first getting your new business domain, never use the email addresses info@ mail@ sales@ webmaster@
As soon as your domain name is listed in various search engines and domain name lists (which are of course good for your search engine rankings), spam groups will automatically send junk emails to those email addresses.
Try to be slightly more creative and use things like ‘enquiries’ ‘information’ etc.
Never put an email address in it’s plain text form anywhere on a web page, anywhere!
There is now a huge bunch of web based ‘robots’ who very quickly scan the text and source codes of websites around the world, finding anything that resembles an email address.
Most commonly, they look out for the @ symbol, and then will pull of the few words either side of it, store this in a massive database, and sell it on to anyone who’s willing to pay a pittance for it.
Similarly be very carefully where any digital versions of your brochures or posters may appear, as pdf documents for example, which show your full email address. The easiest way around this, is for any publicity with which you want to digitalise and put on the web, always swap the @ symbol for the word at, ‘at’, (at), *at* or similar. For example emails(at)ourcompanydomain.co.uk.
Most human users will quickly recognise what to swap around for themselves, although as the (at) technique seems the most common, I don’t expect it will be long until a robot is designed to pick this up too.
Adding extra characters in a different colour, just before your domain name, with instructions beneath the email address, is a pretty effective way. For example emails@SPAMourcompanydomainname.co.uk with instructions for humans to remove the SPAM, is also pretty effective.
If you’re a largely publicised company receiving a lot of unsolicited enquiries to various key staff members, and you have a list of staff (with their first name and surname listed somewhere on your website), try not use the classic firstname.surname@ourcompanydomain.com as these will often be tried by unsolicited callers trying to get in contact.