If you’ve been doing business for any reasonable length of time, you will notice that one area gets flooded with spam above everything else, the helpdesk.

Why? Well, this is a guaranteed way to get your mail through (well almost). Any reasonable company will have support@ addressed through mail, almost guaranteed, and of course, it’s a spammer’s dream! Guaranteed delivery of e-mail, WOOH!

There are three solutions to this problem, all 3 will be covered here:

• Don’t accept the mail
  This response , or solution, isn’t really a response, or solution after all. In this case, you don’t have the mail routed anywhere, you have it nulled completely, and customers can’t get ahold of you through the most common of email addresses. Like I said, not really a solution there, is it?
• Return the mail
  This response receives mail to X address, informs individuals that “this is an unmonitored mailbox, submit a ticket”, then bounces the mail.
  The problem with this solution is that it allows no “tracking” of incidents, and makes your clients do a bit more work. This is, of course, wrong.
  SOME security “experts” will say that this  is more “secure”, as people will email passwords, but that’s not the case. They’re going to put the password into the helpdesk ANYWAYS, which is insecure to begin with (it IS stored unencrypted in mysql, right?), so who cares about email?
• Require registration
  This is the most feasible and realistic of all 3 options. This allows your clients to mail your support desk , after a minor registration. If they’re NOT registered, they receive a mail back saying that their ticket wasn’t accepted and that they need to register @ your helpdesk. Otherwise, the ticket will go right on through. Of course, only a handful of email systems actually have THAT in place, but those that do have some pretty thankful customers

Now, out of those 3, the 3rd is the best used in my opinion.  Of course, yours may differ, but the fact is that spam is a problem. Allowing users to just blindly send spam mail to commonly known and abused email addresses leads to more time fighting and deleting spam than anything else. Why shouldn’t you want to combat spam?