-an awareness-raising initiative which principally concerns

Deficient Website Security

and its direct relationship to junk-mail volumes.

If you run any kind of business operation which suffers from high levels of spam - or where valid email is regularly being lost due to aggressive spamfiltering, then you would do well to spend a minute or two studying what this site has to say.

Where a business is suffering from excessive spam, the instinctive response is to buy spamfiltering services, and to accept the limitations of this approach in terms of partial effectiveness, and lost messages. Very seldom is the question asked, "Why are we getting all this spam, when other businesses do not?" This answer is often simple, though perhaps surprising: Security problems with the associated website are almost always the root of a spam problem.

If you've a commercial wesbite and your contact address is being heavily spammed, chances are your webdesigner is the person responsible for this. Amazingly you may also find they are aware of the security issues, but couldn't give a damn.

You may find this a controversial statement, especially as a check of spamfilter-vendor sites reveals no such information. On other pages we'll describe why that situation exists, but for the moment let's give a brief overview of the actions we suggest you take:

Check your website for address-harvesting issues, either manually or with our online tools.
If issues are found, call your website-maintainer and point these out.
Insist that the harvesting vulnerabilities are fixed. Don't accept any fob-offs or excuses.
Recheck the site to ensure that they have been fixed.

The above won't result in an instant cure for heavy spamming, but over the course of a few weeks you should see the spam start to reduce.

What's more, if you do the checks yourself it should cost you nothing. If your website-maintainer wants to charge for the remedial work, say that you are demanding that a fault in the site be fixed, and that this work should be free.

The advice on this site is provided by IWR Consultancy as a free service to clients and visitors, following from our observations that there is a pressing need for an informational-site of this kind, to consolidate what is known about the harvesting issue in one place, and to dispel some of the myths and disinformation which circulate in abundance.