Do you hide email addresses to "spam bots" on websites?

Question

Although there are still bots harvesting emails, I'm wondering if you hide email addresses on websites. I know this was common practice a few years back, but it seems that it's starting to fade.

Reasons not to:

• most email servers include quality spam protection, including services such as Gmail and hardly any gets through
• it's annoying to code as you have to remember and searching to change the email later can be tricky
• no method will prevent any harvesting

Reasons to:

• avoid getting on lists you don't want to be a part of
• avoid some bots that are getting addresses for sending emails that can't be detected by spam (specific sales/marketing emails) or that technically aren't spam
• the client or your servers don't have great spam detection

Do or don't you and what are your reasons?

Answer 1

Yes, SPAM bots still harvest emails. I saw some stat that said 90% of all email today is SPAM. Obfuscate your email: http://alicorna.com/obfuscator.html It isn't foolproof, but it makes it way harder for your email address to be harvested.

Also, you can make images like facebook does.

Answer 2

I do occassionally, depends on the email address and what the client might be using. As you say, a GMAIL address is usually pretty robust at spam filtering. Often I'll obfuscate the address though, like using a utility like Jason's above or a technique as shown below...

http://techblog.tilllate.com/2008/07/20/ten-methods-to-obfuscate-e-mail-addresses-compared/

Answer 3

You can hide your email address and display it using JS. This isn't also foolproof but offers some protection.

Something like this should do the trick:

<a class="mail">contact me</a>

// in JS
var parts = ['my', '.', 'email', '@', 'example', '.', 'com'];
var elems = document.getElementsByClassName('mail');
var len = elems.length;
for (var i = 0; i < len; i++) {
    elems[i].href = 'mailto:' + parts.join('');
}

Answer 4

In terms of an honest answer, I generally don't bother, because GMail's spam protection is so great. But I also don't really conduct business via e-mails.