This post is old, but touches on a topic that’s near and dear to my heart — methods of stopping spammers from overwhelming a publicly-available e-mail address. It argues that posting an address in a somewhat-obfuscated form (like “myname AT spamtrap DOT com”) actually helps spammers, because it’s much easier to search for using Google (which doesn’t allow you to search for the at-symbol).

But the most interesting idea I saw was this comment:

Obfuscating your address gives may falsely convince you that your important address is safe. If it’s published, in any form (even in the firstname at lastname dot c0m form, or as some kind of puzzle), it is possible for a member of the public (including spammers) to get it. A much better method is to set up a disposable address which forwards to your sacred address. Once the disposable address is compromised and you start getting spam via it, just kill it off and replace it with a different disposable address. Once you trust a sender, you can give them your sacred address. I started using junk1@… in about 2000, and am now on junk7@… and my sacred address is mainly spam free.

That is such a simple answer that I can’t believe I didn’t think of it myself.

Of course, it wouldn’t be very useful for most people, the way e-mail is set up right now. But for a company’s public-facing e-mail address, which must be available on their website, it could be a very useful answer. (If you could refer people to a contact form, instead of publishing an address, that problem is pretty much solved — but if any significant fraction of people started doing that, spammers would figure it out too.)

That also gave me other ideas for stopping spam. I won’t go into them at present, because they need more thought and because I might well create a commercial solution out of them in the future. We’ll see.

(Other interesting comments there include this one and this one.)