

Ask HN: Can you post your naked email address and keep |Spam| bounded? - ez77

I have lately come across several blogs and sites of HNers publishing their naked email addresses, without any kind of obfuscation. I admit that while I don't do this, I no longer check my (Gmail) spam folder for false positives. So, from <i>my</i> point of view it no longer matters whether I have tens, hundreds or millions of spam messages.<p>However, Gmail may care at some point! For those of you brave enough to do this, what is log10(|Spam|)? More importantly, do you feel it significantly impacts your storage quota?<p>Any further comments, as always, will be welcome. Cheers.
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mike-cardwell
On a website I was working on recently I addressed this problem by slightly
obfuscating the email address in the HTML:

<a href="mailto:user(at)example(dot)com">Email us</a>

I then wrote some JavaScript to modify the href attribute to be the real email
address. So for the vast majority of people, they'd get a working mailto:
link, but for the rest, they'd get a mailto: link which required them to
replace (at) and (dot). Not perfect, but I suspect it stops the vast majority
of bots.

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ez77
Now that you mention it, I realize "naked" email addresses may not be naked in
the original html. Thanks.

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rcfox
~2.77 for me.

In my opinion, email obfuscation is like DRM: it doesn't hinder those who want
to crack it for very long, and it just annoys legitimate users.

~~~
ez77
Thank you for answering, rcfox! For a moment I thought nobody would reply.

I guess that, if people put their email addresses in the clear, _serious_ spam
flooding must not be an issue. By the way, I do not publish my email address
and we are not even an order of magnitude apart! (~2.01 for me.)

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MaysonL
mine has varied over the years from ~2.5-3.5

