These are a few of the typical e-mail accounts that people set up in their hosting company e-mail accounts. A few others would contain common employee names such as “john@”, “billsmith@”, “cathy@”, etc.

Spammers pretty much know this and once they have your domain name, they will send out bulk spam messages to every typical name and combination in their database. If you haven’t created a certain e-mail account such as “john@”, then that spam message to that account will be bounced by your hosting company e-mail account. If you have created an email account such as “info@yourdomain”, then that spam message will make it through.

To combat this and still have a “sales@yourdomain”, just add you company initials or an area code to the e-mail name. Mine for example can be: “bfgsales@” or”sales916@”. This will eliminate the possibility of getting a big pile of spam.

When I set up my client with a contact page, I like to leave off the e-mail addresses entirely and install a WordPress plug-in called cFormsII. This contact form is very configurable. It can be set up to be submitted to specific or multiple e-mail recipients and also includes a Captcha security anti-spam feature. I highly recommend it.