Email messages represent the main form of communication between you and your website visitors (customers). Disregarding the email message content, there are at least two ways in which you could receive emails from your customers: through a web based form or due to the existence of a mailto link, like:




Every time you make available a possibility to receive emails from other people, you will be exposed to spammers. As a consequence, the handling of email accounts and general webmail settings at the web server level will play a very important role in receiving and respectively processing the email messages.

In order to minimize spam attempts, it is recommended to enable email filtering systems, which are available on any webhosting account. They will identify spam messages based on the email message content by analyzing the header, body, etc.

You can set the email filter to automatically delete the spam messages, but it is a better idea to redirect them in a certain folder because sometimes the filters could consider (by mistake) that a legal email message is spam. Another alternatives to minimize spam messages is provided by the email authentication methods.

In order to minimize the amount of email messages received from your website visitors, you can implement a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) on your website based on the main requests regarding certain topics. The autoresponders could also help you in reducing the number of emails that must be processed. If you are using an email client on a local computer, it also provides various option to organize the email messages in an efficient manner so that the time of processing to be minimized.

In conclusion, when you select a certain web hosting service, it is a good idea to check the possibilities of webmail configuration and the security features offered. You can also ask your web hosting provider to suggest what could be the recommended web mail settings for your specific needs.