Publish your e-mail address, put up with the spam

In a recent webinar, I recommended that you should publish your e-mail address prominently on your Web site, rather than forcing users to fill in a form. One of the participants asked the obvious question:

"How do you avoid these being picked up and used for sending spam?"

There are ways to spam-protect e-mail addresses (e.g. turning them into graphics). But the real answer is to put up with the spam. It's a small price to pay.

That might not be what you wanted to hear, but it's good business sense. Sure, it's annoying to get spam, but it's even more annoying to lose business.

In any case, although some spammers do get e-mail addresses from Web sites, that's not the most common source now. It's more likely they will get your e-mail address by a virus that infects somebody else's address book and captures all the e-mail addresses in it. And there's nothing you can do about that.