Posting email address -- bad idea?

[Bullgrit]

In many places online, I see people give their email address like this: name (at) gmail (dot) com

It's my understanding that this is done to somehow avoid spam bots or some such. Is this really, (still), an issue? I've given my own email address many times online, including in many places on my own site/blog, but I don't get much email spam.

I get a TOOONNNNN!!!!! of comment spam on my blog -- Akismet catches 99.9% of it, so it doesn't actually get published -- but virtually no email spam through it.

So is giving your email address online really a bad thing, (still)?

Bullgrit

 

[Joker]

It's not a bad idea unless you don't want the CIA to fi

 

[SteelDraco]

The amount of spam you end up getting depends more on your email provider than anything else. I expect that by now most scripts that scan for email addresses in web pages have figured out the syntax you're describing, so I doubt it makes much difference. That's a pretty simple format to search for.

I've found that GMail's spam protection means I pretty much never see any outright spam get to my inbox. It's quite effective. If I go look in the spam folder, it's there, but I have to look for it to see it, and it's all handled behind the scenes.

I personally wouldn't worry about posting my email address on a forum or blog post if I had a good mail host.

 

[Relique du Madde]

So is giving your email address online really a bad thing, (still)?

Bullgrit

Rule of thumb, don't post any address (physical or digital), or phone number online unless you want people to maybe contact you.

 

[Umbran]

Rule of thumb, don't post any address (physical or digital), or phone number online unless you want people to maybe contact you.

More like, "don't post it unless you want to be contacted". The issue with posting an e-mail address is that some spammers will crawl web pages, and scrape out things that look like e-mail addresses and add them to lists to target with spam. So, many of the contacts you're afraid of getting aren't from people, per se.

Mind you, the common things like replacing "somename@someplace.net" with "somename at someplace dot net" are no security. It isn't as if it takes much programming skill to include logical variations in scraping the addresses out.

 

[Sutekh]

I think it should be part of Net Etiquette to always type ones address as trevorathotmail.com rather than trevor[MENTION=89935]hotmail[/MENTION].com

Truth is there is a lot of types on the net who like to spam and inundate users with spam. Just because one of us dosnt get the spam dosnt mean others wont. As stated earlier using the at word instead of the symbol wont cut down on bots harvesting too much but it is a start.

 

[Alan Shutko]

I'd rather make it easy for people to contact me, which is why I've had the address ats[MENTION=16070]AC[/MENTION]m.org for fifteen years and I spell it in the clear. I'm always a bit annoyed when I have to unobfuscate an email address... Maybe I should make a browser extension that does it for me.

I do get spam on that address, which is probably due to the fact that it's been live for fifteen years as well as the fact that it's all over the internet, but the spam is manageable with modern filters.

 

[Umbran]

I think it should be part of Net Etiquette to always type ones address as trevorathotmail.com rather than trevor[MENTION=89935]hotmail[/MENTION].com

Well, I figure that it is bad etiquette to post someone else's address, in general. And you can post your own however you want. It isn't like you posting your address will somehow get *me* spammed.

 

[Agamon]

Identity theft through social engineering is a good reason to not list it any form.

 

[Kzach]

I've found that GMail's spam protection means I pretty much never see any outright spam get to my inbox. It's quite effective. If I go look in the spam folder, it's there, but I have to look for it to see it, and it's all handled behind the scenes.

This.

I have one email account that gets roughly 1,000 spam emails a DAY, and I might see one of them in my inbox every couple of months or so, everything else gets sifted to the spam folder. Hell, the only reason I even bother to check the spam folder is that every once in a while (like, maybe once a year) I get a genuine email filtered in there that I have to go scrummaging for.