pne | Email address on web pages

Piers cawley posted on his blog about putting email addresses on web pages.

Among other things, he quoted a conference slide which said, It’s 2007. Every spammer has your email address. Put it on your goddamn webpage so people can get ahold of you about interesting things. He also goes on to say, in reference to his habit of putting his email address in clear text, complete with mailto: link, Yes, I get spammed, so will you. So do you, I’ll bet. But I’ll pay the cost of making it easy for spammers if it also makes it easy for people I want to hear from to get in touch with me.

That made me re-think a couple of my websites. I mean, I already get spam in the first place and have spam filters to deal with that; on the whole, they do a good job (and when they err, it's nearly always on the side of false negatives, i.e. spam in my inbox, rather than false positives, i.e. ham in my Junk folder). So I suppose I might as well go back to being more open about my email address.

What do you think?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I think Piers is absolutely right. It's something I've thought for a long time.

It made sense to me nearly immediately when I read it; I had simply never thought about it. Perhaps I needed a little nudge.

I think he's dead wrong. My work account address is publicly posted and it gets tonnes of spam; my personal one isn't and I get hardly anything there.

I suppose I approach it differently because my address already gets a ton of spam, so it can't get much worse. (I hope.)

I suppose it's different if you're lucky enough to be relatively spam-free.

Perhaps the audience the presenter and he were talking to is also different from you.

I don't know.

Believe me, I know how rare it is to have an account like that. That's why I hang onto it despite the unreliability of the IP and other issues.

I disagree as well. I used to get around 100-150+ pieces of spam mail daily, when I used to keep my e-mails online, without obscuring them in some manner. A year or two after I started hiding them (ie, splitting with tables, changing @ to the hexidecimal code, throwing in hidden html, etc), the spam rate dropped. And as of today, I get around 5-20 pieces of spam per day.

That surprises me. I thought that once you were on a list, you could pretty much say goodbye to that address since lists would be traded etc.

I never made any measurements myself, but it's interesting that spam can apparently get less once the address gets less visible, if your case is representative.

I think lists get expired and updated after some time. Although, I have, on occasions, taken my entire spam folder and chosen to bounce all of the e-mails (an option in the MacOS X Mail application; it returns the mail to the sender, mimicing the "invalid address" response). That may have a small effect on things... I don't know.

I may be mistaken - it may have been over a period of 3-5 years. I don't know - I don't keep precise records of spam. This is only what I remember.

Several other programs do that as well (bounce back to sender). I have that option with IncrediMail.

as of today, I get around 5-20 pieces of spam per day.

Me too. My email address has been publically available all over the interweb in a non-obfuscated form for years and years. I just use software to filter out spam, so I very rarely see it.

I totally disagree. One of my addresses was posted in ONE place, and I'm still getting run-over with junk (and only junk) to that e-mail account.

I try to keep all of mine private. Once you list it somewhere, you're going to get the crap spammed out of you.

I think part of the point was that most of "us" (for some values of "us") already get the crap spammed out of us, so whether the email is public or not will not make much difference to us, but will make a difference to those trying to contact us.

If you're lucky enough to be getting nearly no spam, that will probably not work as well for you.

There's is a point to that, but why should it be made easier for spammers?
If someone really needs to contact you, then, yes, an e-mail should be listed there, but listed as a way of not getting it scraped or whatever by spammer bots, like yournameATyourdomainDOTcom. That seems to help on a good portion of spammers.

why should it be made easier for spammers?

Counter-question: why should it be made more difficult for people?

I think that's part of what's behind's Piers's article.

For example, if you locked your children indoors and never let them outside nor let anybody else in, their chance of being abducted is nearly nil. If you let people in and your children out, you're "making it easier for abductors".

But the thing is, I doubt most people think of it that way. It's a trade-off, sure, but one in which the advantages outweigh the possible disadvantages.

Similarly here: the proposed advantages to the general public if they want to contact you are real; the disadvantage of making it easier for spambots to find you may not need to be your primary consideration. Especially if spambots have already found you and you're getting spam as it is -- then hiding the address would have nearly only disadvantages (people legitimately looking for your address will have to jump through hoops, while spammers already have it anyway).

But where's the proof that spammers already have your e-mail. A big portion, to my understanding, is just trail and error for a spammer, and use just common words used in e-mail addresses.

I get the point, but I'd rather someone not be able to contact me, considering there are plenty of ways to be able to do it with other items (IM's, blogs, etc).

But where's the proof that spammers already have your e-mail. A big portion, to my understanding, is just trail and error for a spammer, and use just common words used in e-mail addresses.

To the extent that that's true, then not posting your address doesn't help at all against those spammers. And to the extent that it's not true, the spam in the mailbox is the proof that they already have your e-mail.

I absolutely agree with this Piers guy. I also think a big portion of spammers are getting addresses submitted to webservices, not from crawling webpages.

Yeah, I agree with what he's saying - in theory. but for the first time in my life my two primary email addresses get hardly any spam - as in maybe 2 or 3 per month - between both email addresses! (and I've had both these email accounts more than 5 years each).

I put this down to my complete paranoia about listing my email address!! (so not going to be changing my habits any time soon!)

:)

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