Why?

Q: Why are so many of us afraid of making their email address accessible?

Latest studies show that over 97% of the spam is being sent to addresses that have been posted on public websites. In most cases they look like this:

<a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a>

or even without a link:

[email protected]

Q: How should I post the email?

Roughly, there are 3 options:

  1. Post the email like me [at] mydomain.com or replace an @ sign with a respective graphic. You can’t click it, it’s not a link and New message window is not going to pop up. So your client, a friend or mom just has to remember it for a minute, open the the New email window and type it in. Yes, it’s clumsy and it might not work. Spammers are smart.
  2. Call your IT and advise the use of DNSBL, install SpamAssassin, configure the mail server to make rDNS and investigate the possibilities of using DEA.
  3. Use address munging.

Q: What is address munging and why?

One of the most common ways for the spammers to get your email address is to use a specific software, a bot that crawls websites, public mailing list archives and/or other sites for emails. Address munging would basically mean changing your email address into something they can’t detect. It is the obfuscation process.

Q: How do I obfuscate an email?

Use obfuscatr. It turns an email into code that you can copy and paste to your site.

If you are using Mac that is older than macOS Catalina, you may also want to download obfuscatr Dashboard widget.

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