Steps You Can Take in 2016 Against Unwanted Emails

Noel Lawrence
Apr 20, 2016
1 min read

A tech savy friend who runs a popular site recently told me that he's been cyber-stalked before. Here's what he did to reduce that by about 90%:

When someone tries to harass me through my own contact form, that's the easiest thing to filter. It can be done using IP addresses (or ranges), by flagging keywords and key phrases the person uses (stalkers often repeat themselves), and by dropping cookies onto their browsers to tag their devices. I love the cookie method since in my experience most stalkers aren't very tech savvy, so even if they switch locations, they'll always be blocked if their device has been tagged with a cookie. I make the contact form time out on them when they try to use it, which tends to make them give up eventually since they don't know if the website is broken or if their message actually went through or not. One time I had the contact form redirect the stalker to fbi.gov; I don't like doing that though because I'd rather de-escalate than escalate.

On my old site I did this with a PHP script. On my new site I converted it to a WordPress plugin. It also does more basic keyword filtering to reduce the volume of unwanted email, like spam from marketers or SEO promoters, redirecting such people to a polite message letting them know I'm not interested in receiving such messages. This filtering cuts my email volume by about 90%.

photo by Lee Morley via creative commons license search and from

https://www.flickr.com/photos/spookman01/6790694167/in/photolist-7enPid-bTk7s6-mi3t3-5eLLdx-N8rfH-gK7GrV-ePnt3p-5J1RZQ-5mh1VV-6nMiK5-jyQmDQ-bKhE4F-2xqji-bm55MV-4JfFbP-oS5PK-7sYYEA-5uZXKi-pqBizr-5jARBC-bx1oyW-7X31Uq-6RyMSK-9Vs9a-d6Gusy-2Dh3u-7972f6-sZSme-EkDVb-6ox3Gt-oRz8e6-bQW1qX-dBda5d-pGDpJL-zL1rU-trxNh-jzNbWS-269fB-85aW7-ddXm8N-8AiKNt-z78Mi-4A8L2j-EWwSX-pAZUn-pjPQb-4nJNUs-KATfY-6wRQrs-js11U/