Why I publish my email address on the web (and how I prevent spam)

Early last year, I removed comments from my site.

In their place, I posted a message inviting people to email me directly (or contact me on Twitter) if they had any questions or comments.

I also publish my email address on my about page, and send my daily newsletter from my actual email address, too. None of that donotreply business here. And no random contact form that goes into the void.

It’s been awesome.

Why I do it

So, comments on websites kind of suck.

They’re overrun with spam. Many of them are just people trying to show off how much they think they know about a topic of “prove you wrong” or point out that you spelled a word wrong because OMG spelling police!

This is my personal website that I maintain to share my thoughts and ideas and perspectives. It’s not a public message board.

That doesn’t mean I don’t want feedback or comments. I love hearing those. I love getting reader questions. Seriously, please email me to ask me anything JS (or hip-hop) related!

But not at the bottom of my articles.

Getting an email from a reader means I get to interact with them in a more meaningful way. There’s none of that “did they actually see that I posted a response a few days later” uncertainty. It’s more personal.

And I often share reader emails and perspectives (with permission) when I think it’s something everyone else reading my stuff will enjoy or benefit from, too.

But what about spam?

I mentioned that spam comments were a big issue. So what about email spam?

Not a problem for me.

I suspect my email provider’s amazing spam filters catch a lot of it. I use G-Suite from Google.

But another thing that I think helps a lot is that I encode my email address. WordPress has a great article on how to protect your email from harvesters.

I don’t use WordPress anymore, but in the article, they link to this online encoding tool. I put my email into it, and use the encoded version that comes out all over my website instead.

One last thing

If you ever have a JS question, like something I wrote, disagree with something I wrote, or just want to say, please email me.

You can reach me at chris@gomakethings.com.