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]

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.

[sarah-cb.livejournal.com]

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.

[pne.livejournal.com]

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).

[sarah-cb.livejournal.com]

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).

[sedesdraconis.livejournal.com]

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.