: Risk of Plaintext Email Addresses on Websites What are the risks of putting a personal email address (Gmail, in case it matters) on a personal website? A glance around any forum will show many

@Tiffany637

You can probably expect a lot of spam. There are scripts available to obfuscate email addresses if you still want to display them. You can use Cloudflare for example.

See email obfuscation link: support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200170016

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@Sherry384

Okay. This is something I know a lot about.

E-mail harvesters are very cleaver and have been so for quite a while. You are right there are several common text munges that can be read including the one you mentioned. And yet they are still used. The effectiveness of any text based munge can be debated. I will stay out of those arguments. I am sure there is some level of effectiveness in them.

I created mungeMaster in 2001 as a Windows application and posted it online in 2003. Since 2001, I have not had one e-mail address harvested which is important since it is the first step that spammers seem to take other than buying or sharing a list. Since I began using mungeMaster I have not had one spam e-mail sans two sites that were hacked and in the news (not mine of course) and family computers that got infected.

If you would like to try mungeMaster it is on my site. You can search mungemaster email in Google and you should fine it okay. There are other e-mail munges available though only one more that I have seen goes the length I do. My munge may no longer be the best but it is clearly one of the best. I would try a few and figure out which one you like the best.

Spam is not the only risk. Viruses and Trojans come via e-mail too. You can lose a lot of hard work if a system get infected.

I highly recommend people use an advanced e-mail munge as much as possible. It just makes sense.

Good Luck!

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