Active Web Hosting uses a specific method to control spam. We also keep an updated list of spam web links and keywords that are found by our server. Please see A Technical Explanation of How E-Mail Works for more information.

While it may be useful to keep your Postmaster account active, you may find an increase in spam in this account. Most common forms include forged rejected mail messages and messages sent to E-Mail accounts that are non-existant on your domain. You can effectively turn off incoming E-Mail to your postmaster account and still be able to use it to send E-Mail if you need to. For more information, please see How To Filter Your Postmaster Account.

Active Web Hosting has filtering capabilities built into the Web Mail interface. This lets you filter out undesirable messages before they arrive in your inbox. For more information, please see How To Filter Your E-Mail. Note that these filters will take effect even if you use your own E-Mail Client Program since they filter the messages when they come into your domain's mail server.

Spammers rely on the fact that your E-Mail is active in order to know where to send more spam. If they get a reply back, then they may sell this E-Mail address as an "active" one to more spammers, to make more money off your E-Mail address. One technique they use is to send to info@yourdomain.com, webmaster@yourdomain.com or even administrator@yourdomain.com for example. They know that many people set up these types of E-Mail addresses with autoresponders so that the domain owner can send information and help to their visitors. This of course shows that the domain is active and has active E-Mail accounts. This results in yet more spam. Be careful of using an autoresponder using any of these usernames.

Another helpful spam-control idea is to create an E-Mail account called 'abuse' (ie. abuse@yourdomain.com for example). If someone receives spam from your domain (ie. maybe one of your hostees) then people usually automatically send the E-Mail and headers to abuse@yourdomain.com for example. This way you can keep the complaints separate. Otherwise, any E-Mail from any non-existant account ends up in your postmaster@yourdomain.com E-Mail inbox.

Most E-Mail programs allow you to filter spam using a set of rules. For more information, please see our E-Mail Filtering FAQs.