Many bloggers go out of their way to mask their email address on websites to prevent “robots” from harvesting them for inbound spam purposes–Chris Brogan types his out (blog at chrisbrogan.com), Darren Rowse prefers a contact form, and David Meerman Scott uses both.
My impression is their tactics are to prevent email spam bombardment:
I received these messages over the past 24 hours. Other than sender and subject, I have no idea what’s inside. I never clicked into them. I don’t need to.
The pests never entered my inbox. Why?
I use GMail, or the free Google Mail service which is great at blocking spam:
After seven years of using Yahoo Mail, I was inundated with spam. I routinely used ascii tools such as this to convert my address into anti-spam gobbledygook. But I shifted to GMail over two spurts in 2007 and 2008 and never went back. Spam protection was a major reason.
Every few days, I browse through the list to check for false positives. Nine and nine-tenth times out of 10, everything there is marked spam for a reason.
Occasionally, inbound messages pass the spam test and enter my inbox. I don’t open the messages, though, but click a “report spam” button and the offender is whisked away.
Spam messages are deleted automatically if stored for 30 days, but I usually toss the list after 14. Right now, there are 295 messages from 10 days. Imagine if I still had Yahoo Mail or Hotmail or who-knows-what email solution with a less-fancy spam trapper; egad!
You can continue to email Chris, Darren, and David by copying-pasting-and-rewriting text or filling out forms. Or you can email me by clicking this link which should automatically open your email program: ariherzog@gmail.com.
Oh yeah. If you don’t have an email program on your machine, I have a contact form, too.
You?
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