Email address on web pages

[pne]

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?

Comments

[pne.livejournal.com]

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.

[ibneko.livejournal.com]

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.

[sarah-cb.livejournal.com]

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