

Ask HN: Is putting my main Gmail address on a public site a bad idea? - grinnick

I want to put my main Gmail account address on my blog to make it easy for people to contact me.<p>Im wondering if doing this will increase the amount of spam I see in my inbox? I use this account for most email usage so I&#x27;d rather not wreck it with spam.
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dangrossman
I write my e-mail address on my blog, on public profiles, and all over the
web. I have done so for almost 20 years. I don't have a spam problem. Spam
filters work, and spammers do not really have to crawl for e-mails, they'll
get your address eventually anyway.

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erichurkman
I have two accounts, my primary as well as a secondary, public address that
simply forwards to my main. This has the added benefit that I can label any
messages from the public secondary address, giving me a bit of information
about how the person found my email address.

The downside is that the unsubscribe feature in Gmail does not work for most
mailing lists, even if you set up aliases correctly.

If that address ever does get inundated with spam, I can simply terminate it.

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27182818284
I'd definitely use a different email address. In addition to spambots crawling
the blog there are jerks that will disagree with something you said and
manually enter your email address into porn sites, shady-deal sites, and
others when they have a bad day.

It is incredibly cheap/easy to get a second email address so simply do that.

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ioddly
I'd come up with a forwarding address just in case. I do have several email
addresses pointing at my main gmail public. One of them doesn't get any spam,
the other keeps getting spam from one idiot offering me SEO services. But
those are on pretty low traffic sites.

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xauronx
Go for it. It's not like your e-mail address is unique and can't be found in
other places. Out of curiosity, if you google it does anything come up? Spam
filters work and you aren't stupid if something does get through.

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sejje
I think the advice of the others is definitely the side to err on; that said,
I almost never have spam get through to my inbox on gmail. Once per month,
perhaps.

I've had my email on display on my homepage at various times.

