How to stop unsolicited e-mail from your site

If you run a business site or blog, chances are you often receive many unsolicited e-mails in your inbox. They vary from offering the SEO service, asking for a free guest post, or trying to make you buy their product or service. The list goes on. How to stop them from reaching your inbox? Let’s start, here’s how to stop unsolicited e-mail from your site or blog.

Identify their origin

This is important. But, it’s not easy too. As a webmaster, we need to be able to identify how those e-mails arrived on our inbox. Once we have the list of their origins, the next step is easier.

But if you’re unable to do this, that’s fine. You can skip to the third step below.

Block their origin

If possible, try to block their origin. As an example, if these e-mails are coming from various IP addresses from a country you didn’t plan to serve, then it makes sense to set up a firewall to block that entire country to access your site. This will eventually block them to get your contact and send you an e-mail.

I use Cloudflare for this purpose. It’s working well for me. I block some countries which send me that kind of e-mails. It’s been a month since I put up the firewall. Since I did that, I never receive a single unsolicited e-mail anymore.

Yet, please keep in mind if this step can’t guarantee to stop those e-mails. At the very least, for most cases, you should see a significant reduction in the number of unsolicited e-mails you receive.

Don’t write raw e-mail address

On this blog, I write my e-mail as Kevin at kevinhq dot com. With this, spammer bots won’t be able to collect the e-mail address. Humans will be able to read that e-mail address but a bot won’t be.

You shouldn’t expect those e-mail senders are sending their e-mails manually. For most cases, they will run a program that crawls or scrapes the pages on your site to get your e-mail address or other contacts there.

Report as spam

This is what I do if I still receive those unsolicited e-mails. But, if this doesn’t work and the future e-mails are still arriving in my inbox, I will do the next step.

Set up a filter

I’ll set up a filter on my Gmail. I am not sure with other e-mail providers. However, Gmail provides me to do these on the filtered e-mails:

• Skip the Inbox (Archive it)

• Mark as read

• Star it

• Apply the label

• Forward it to another address

• Delete it

• Never send it to Spam

• Always mark it as important

• Never mark it as important

• Categorize as (set up your category here)

Of course, I choose to Delete it. This way, even those e-mail slips into my inbox, the filter will delete it before it appears there.

That’s my last resort. So far, this last resort always does the job very well. Later, I will just go to Trash and click Empty Trash. With this, my inbox is always clean. All important e-mails never miss my attention because unsolicited e-mails buried it deep down.