With the ease of the Internet comes the other side of the coin: Unsolicited or spammy emails. There are some emails that are sent by bots, usually because you disclosed on your website your email address. This means that a bot can scan your (any) website and retrieve matching phrases such as “[email protected]”. Same if you have your email address visible at HTML level (the code where the page is created).
Usually, in case of bots, the chance that you can actually do something is very limited because they might use proxies or mask their identity. In this case it is advisable to hide your email address from your page, adding instead a contact form like mine. See it here. If you need help with setting a page like this, give me a shout and we can talk about it. Another thing you can do is to block any unrelated countries from accessing to your website. For example, if you are working as a plumber in Dublin, you don’t need to show your website to China, Africa, Kazakhstan, etc.
In case instead, you are receiving emails from spammers, like a company who wants to sell you something and they are so crap at their job that nobody wants to buy from them, I have something for you as a surprise to them: You can report them!
How to report an email spammer? I explain it to you. It is very easy
1.Check their email address and their domain left into your email. For example: [email protected] . To be sure it is the real domain, you can go deeper and open the email as “view the source”. This depends on the email client you have (the app you use to read email). As there are too many, please leave a comment in case you cannot find it and I will search for you.
2.Connect to WHOIS database at https://www.whois.com/whois . There you can type in the domain, in this example spammingdomain.com
You will see a list of information about the domain. Scroll down till you see a section that relates to abuse@domainsomething. This is the email address where to forward the spammer email. The following is an example:
In the image above, you got the email where to send your complaint, which refer to the Registrar Abuse Contact Email.
3.You have to forward the email you received and mostly, you have to attach the source of the spamming/abusive email. In my case I use Thunderbird by Mozilla, so I just click on the menu and select “View Source” then opens a text file. I then save as TXT and that’s it. Again, in case you need to how what it the way to see the source file in your email, leave me a comment below.
Once you have sent the email, you should receive an automatic reply telling you that your case has been received and they will investigate. Depending on the case and the number of complaints, they could remove that domain.
The following is an example of the response I received which disabled the domain associated with the reported email:
Conclusion
This is the correct way to report a spammer or abusive email received into your inbox. It is effective but on the other side little bit time consuming and it maybe requires a little bit of technical skill to search in the whois database and retrieve the source code of the email. If you followed my steps above you should have done all correctly and now you are waiting for a reply from the domain authority. Well done. Please share below in the comments your experience.
Donald Piccione is a professional marketeer with over 10 years experience in SEO, PPC and Digital Automation.
Since 2008 he is also the founder and editor of an Irish News website for Italians called Tuttoirlanda.
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