Is It Safe To Post Your Email Address Publicly?

Date First Published: 20th March 2023

Topic: Computer Networking

Topic: Network Services

Article Type: Computer Questions & Answers

Difficulty Level: 3/10

Learn about whether it is safe to post your email address publicly in this article.

Sometimes, you might think of posting your email address publicly so that people can contact you if they have any questions. We don't recommend that you post your email address online in a public place where anyone can see it, such as internet forums, chatrooms, newsgroups, and comments sections. Freely sharing your email address publicly is not safe as anyone can use it to send you spam and it could very easily go to the wrong person. Your email address is a form of personal information that you should avoid revealing publicly and is the most common way that you can be vulnerable to spam.

At the very least, if you publicly reveal your email address, you will be exposed to unsolicited email messages from salespeople. You will also be exposed to phishing emails and viruses that spread through email attachments from malicious users and bots.

Spambots

Spambots are bots that crawl the internet for email addresses and automatically send spam emails to a large number of email addresses at once. Spambots can capture email addresses by detecting the '@' symbol. Once your email address has been captured by a spambot and added to the spam mail list, it can be difficult to block the sender as some spambots use fake email addresses that vary with every message, so you might find that spam email messages continue even after blocking the sender.

What To Do Instead?

For the reasons above, revealing your email address online in a public place that anyone can see is not safe. Avoid publicly revealing your email address and if you absolutely have to reveal it publicly, you should set up a temporary email account or make your email address harder to capture by spambots, such as 'contact(at)websiteowner.com'. The 'at' represents the @ symbol. Even though people will have to manually type your email address and won't be able to click on it to open their email application with your email in the 'to' field, this will reduce the chances of your email address being captured by spambots as these are designed to crawl the web and detect email addresses. You can also type your email address, take a screenshot of it, and then post it as an image, so that your email address is visible and cannot be captured by spambots.

If you have a website, you can use a contact form that contains fields for users to enter the subject, their email address, and their message. Once submitted, the entered form data will be sent to your email address. Contact forms often use the PHP mail function to send emails or they can use third-party tools. This will help reduce email spam as your email address will never be visible on your website, making it impossible for it to be crawled by spambots. However, this does not prevent all spam as it can still come through contact forms, but it will make it much more difficult to send spam. A lot of websites have a CAPTCHA on a contact form in order to prevent bots from abusing the online services using automated scripts. For more information about contact pages, see this article.

Conclusion

In conclusion, if you post your email address publicly, it comes with a lot of security risks, including:

• You will be exposed to unsolicited email messages from salespeople and spambots.
• You will be exposed to security risks, such as phishing and viruses that spread through email attachments.
• Your email address could be added to a spam mail list by spambots, which can regularly send you spam messages.
• Even if you block the sender, some spambots use fake email addresses that vary with every message, so you might find that spam email messages continue even after blocking the sender.

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