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Ask HN: Can you post your naked email address and keep |Spam| bounded?
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 my point of view it no longer matters whether I have tens, hundreds or millions of spam messages.
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?
Any further comments, as always, will be welcome. Cheers.
- rcfox 16y ago~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 16y agoThank 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 By the way, I do not publish my email address and we are not even an order of magnitude apart!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.)
- MaysonL 16y agomine has varied over the years from ~2.5-3.5
- mike-cardwell 16y agoOn 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.
- ez77 16y agoNow that you mention it, I realize "naked" email addresses may not be naked in the original html. Thanks.