My girlfriend, who is in IT, always uses the methods you discuss here to minimise spam to her account.

Creating a separate account for posting an address publicly and applying all of these filters means that if ever the account stops being useful or completely flooded with spam then you can throw it away and get another one without having the hassle normally involved. All your existing email will still be stored in your main account and you don’t have to get all your personal contacts to switch over to sending you email at a new address because you gave them your private one which is far less likely to ever change.

I knew this would be one of those posts that people either agreed or disagreed with. Similar to my post on copy/pasting from Word into a blog post which fortunately I no longer need to worry about it breaking Internet Explorer.

There was an option that created a mailto: link that protected you from the search bots. I’m happy to add that into the post?

If you use gmail then yes you are protected to a large extent from spam but not everyone has that option (unfortunately).

And I agree that images can easily be misinterpreted. I do have a chuckle thinking how may people are adding the s to the end of waters and how many emails the other suewaters is receiving into her gmail account (she shouldn’t have stole my s!).

It really depends on the students, their ages and the policies/guidelines in the school/District. There are a lot of school districts where it is against policy for students to use their own email address. There are also a lot of school districts where it is a requirement that educators have to monitor both comments and posts closely — hence the reason why they’ll often use the gmail+ method. It doesn’t necessarily mean that I always agree but it does mean that I have to highlight this aspect because my blog is read by both educators and students; all who are required to compile with different guidelines depending on where they are based.

You are correct about #2 – the search bots will or do probably search for the variations.

Using the dots in the email address is a good alternative which I hadn’t thought of. It is a shame that some of the tricks that we can use to protect our email address are the same tricks that splogs are using to create massive numbers of spam blogs.

I did think about adding gmail onto the list of ways to protect your email. I suppose my question back to you is that gmail is already very good at controlling spam. Why wouldn’t you combine all your email into the one gmail account by forwarding them to it as opposed to sending it out from the gmail account? Especially since you can set up gmail to make it look like you are responding from another email account?

Thanks for writing about this post on your blog and sharing the information you found. I’ve added in EmailCover to my list of email image generators and included your link to the bottom of my post.