HACKER Q&A
📣 llm_nerd

Do you still obfuscate email addresses online?


Do the residents of HN still practice email obfuscation? Is this still a recommended practice? Do the spammers out there still bother scraping email addresses online?

I've been raw dogging email addresses online for well over a decade to no negative effect. The only unsolicited emails that actually come through are ones by people telling me that I should obfuscate my email address, which is a humorous irony.

If I hosted my own email server I'd probably be more concerned with this, but as is the BigCoâ„¢ spam filters have been amazingly effective across my domains, and I like to think my heroic unobscured email address helps train the system for everyone else. False positives aren't a problem, and it is incredibly rare that actual spam gets through.

And just as a gut feeling backed by some adhoc tests with new domains and accounts, I suspect that spam lists are populated mostly with email addresses that people voluntarily share with services, then resold. Scraping just doesn't seem to be it anymore.


  👤 JohnFen Accepted Answer ✓
I stopped doing email address obfuscation about 15 years ago, opting instead to add a honeypot email address. Anybody who sends an email to the honeypot is automatically added to a list of senders whose emails get dropped when they're sent to the real address.