Stop obfuscating your email addresses!

Please, please… it is simply not worth it – the spambots veryquickly catch on to any new method, and they will harvest your email address somehow.  If not from your website, then from your friends contact list, or that greeting card or party invitation sent via a website.

You are simply wasting your time and making it harder for your valid visitors and for valid emails to get t o you..

Jason Priem puts the case fairly well.

So what to do?

Use a good spam filter.    Gmail does the best job so far and yes you can continue to use your domain name email.

I have the following setup:

  1. email@domain is forwarded to Gmail
  2. Gmail set to send as email@domain
  3. Email software (outlook or thunderbird for eg) set to use IMAP against Gmail (use folders and lables work well together, are synschronised)

This means that I have a local backup of everything that is on gmail (yes – maybe gears is also kinda a local backup), and should Gmail fail, I simply unforward from my domain email and start accessing it directly from the email package.

A while back when Gmail seemed a bit slow, I tried taking it out of the loop, but with a couple of weeks was back again – their accuracy in handling spam is amazing, less spam and less false positives – this makes all the difference.

Some detail on the battle.