Do you still expose your email on sites

[Timgab]

Placing your email on a website can lure spammers and trolls, with bots possibly crawling the web to gather these addresses.

This increases concerns about privacy and unwanted enquires/request. Most times this do land in frauds or spamming.

Share your approach: do you boldly display your email, risking unwanted attention, or you prefer the option for a more secure 'Contact Us' form in sites?

Striking the right balance between accessibility and protection is very vital in this our age where online privacy is paramount.

Exist there any strategies and experiences you use or prefer in other to protect your mail boxes while while still having a smooth communication with friends and users.

 

[Arantor]

Contact form every time.

 

[Empire]

Contact or even use the business email - [email protected] Never use YOUR personal address that is family based

 

[Reverie]

I definitely rather have a contact form if possible now a days. The less access the better - but like Empire said, if possibly create a new email with false dates of birth/name that way it will not link or trace back to you.

 

[Cory]

I had a contact form on my site, but it never got used for any real reason other than occasional spam, so I removed it. I guess that one lonely guest who's going to have a registration issue one day will be lost because people kept wanting to use the contact form for spam.

I never post any type of email address publicly.

 

[⭐ Alex ⭐]

Cloudflare has a protection I believe. One that detects bots and show them blurred emails. Probably by using known IPs and user agent.

I might show an email, but Im not sure. It should be fairly simple to guess it anyhow.

 

[Darth Cognus]

Contact form first, general email second (sitething@sitename), never personal email if you value your sanity. Better off sitename@proton or businessusename@generalemailplace or whatever, less professional and maybe more to wrangle but if you're in the boat you do what you must.

If issuing a response to a general/contact form inquiry, using a site-linked email (not personal) is better practice too, although responding to clearly valid inquiries with a personal email is better than doing nothing.

Expect this to be a spam vector either way, it exists for edge cases and completeness, not because you expect it to be fruitful on a daily basis. It pays off a little more if you have a community with scale. Alex has the right track for using steps to protect it from garbage from there. You could do client side wizardry with the form depending on the software you use to discourage spam inputs.