Are you an accidental spammer?

This is a question that some people should really ask themselves. What is an accidental spammer, you ask? Well, you already know what a spammer is, right? Someone who plagues you with e-mails, faxes, voicemails, etc. to do something, try something or buy something and usually, let’s face it, you just aren’t that interested in what they are selling right?

An accidental spammer is someone who, has their heart in the right place, but fails to realize that they are spamming you with requests through Twitter, Skype, IM, or e-mail and they just don’t let up! These accidental spammers don’t realize that the approach they are taking with you, is spamming, but in reality, it is.

You can try to ignore these requests, turn off your Skype, IM, Twitter app, etc. but then, you are taking the chance of alienating people that you actually want to hear from!

What can be done about accidental spammers then. Not much, unless you want to take the time to address each and every one that come through, but then, you might just be enabling them to feel like they can contact you that way from now on.

By the way, this post was prompted by an accidental spammer (in case you haven’t figured that out by now). Bottom line, instead of becoming an accidental spammer, when someone doesn’t respond back to you right away addressing your request, take the hint and move on. The person you are trying to get their attention might just have other things going on that prevents them from addressing you right now. If the interest is there, be assured, they will respond eventually.

Comments to this post are welcome. Try not to spam me though, ok?

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I hate hackers about as much as

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Ok, maybe hate is too strong of word, despise is more like it. I despise hackers about as much as I despise spammers. Lately, almost every day, I’m either fighting off a hacker who wants to play havoc with one of my domains or a spammer that wants to fill my inbox with bogus requests from one of my online forms.

Normal spammers don’t bother me much, as my spam filter catches those and they go bye bye real fast. The spammers that use bots to automatically fill out online forms are really starting to get my fluff up.

Thanks to Patti Serrano and her ever watching eyes, she caught a hacker on one of my sites, shortly after the attempt was made. She alerted me via Twitter Direct Message (another reason I love Twitter) about this and I immediately stopped what I was doing and thwarted their attempts.

In this particular case, the hackers were not malicious, just having a little fun exploiting a security flaw in my online shopping cart. It took me about 10 minutes to identify the flaw and seal the hole and get my site back online again.

Now, the spammers had to be dealt with. Since the site they were hitting is not programmed in PHP, I couldn’t use something elaborate as Captcha, so instead, I sit down and wrote my own routines within the form submission program I am using (sort of like Captcha, but not as sophisticated) and then I tested this new setup and it appears that this will stop the spammers (for now at least).

Like anything else that is working right, hackers and spammers are a way of life for an online presence. These ever present thorns in our back sides won’t go away very soon. Take my advice, especially if you have multiple web sites and domains, check them frequently for hacking attempts and get your sites fixed right away or else it could cost you customers, visitors and most importantly, your reputation.

Oh, one more thing to remember, if you have ANYTHING that requires a login and password, DON’T just set this to the default or turn it off so that it is easier for you to get in. If it’s easy for you to get in, it’s easy for EVERYONE to get in!

Popularity: 14% [?]