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all are fairly useless. once your e-mail address gets out (and it will) obfuscating it is pretty pointless and just makes it harder for legitimate people to co
by there 18y ago
all are fairly useless. once your e-mail address gets out (and it will) obfuscating it is pretty pointless and just makes it harder for legitimate people to contact you. if you post to mailing lists, your address is surely out there in plain sight anyway. use a plain mailto: link and block spam at the smtp/mua level.
i've been using the same email address for almost a decade which is now in many mailing list archives, surely a bunch of spammers lists, and on every page of my website as a regular mailto: link with no obfuscation. my mail is filtered with sufficient smtp-level protection and maybe 1 junk message a day actually gets to my inbox.
- ambition 18y agoSecond that. My email address is public and forwards to GMail, where the Google spam filter gives one false negative a week and I can't remember a false positive. Google has spam beat.
- jonknee 18y agoMy Gmail inbox would disagree with you.
- DocSavage 18y agoI disagree. You want users to have some trust that you're at least trying to do the right thing. I use unique forwarding e-mails for every website I'm signed up to, and I've noticed a lot of spam harvested from Github. It makes me feel less warm & fuzzy about an otherwise excellent website. Using one of the first two methods in the article is simple, so why not implement it? You're right that spammers will eventually get widely used e-mails, but you can minimize the chance it's your website's fault. The only reason I can see not to do it is cross-browser/accessibility issues. Does anyone know if these techniques cause problems?
- Tichy 18y agoWhat smtp-level protection are you using? I recently kind of gave up and just relied on the Thunderbird spam filter, in addition to my handcrafted rules. Now there are already thousands of files in my junk mail folder. It is infeasible to check them by hand, so I'll never learn about any false positives. In other words, email is not a reliable way to reach me anymore :-(
- there 18y agoi was using a greylisting approach which filtered a lot of spam, but was annoying for customers who had to wait an hour to receive an initial e-mail from a new contact. i've since switched back to postini. i haven't seen any changes on way or the other since their google acquisition, but their filtering is very accurate and they offer a webmail-like interface for checking/forwarding spam and adjusting settings.
- Tichy 18y agoGreylisting also brought me some relief for a while, but I don't think it is a longterm solution. Will check out postinit, thanks!