I’m using the Basically Basic theme, although I think this is true of other themes: My email address is right there in a “mailto” element, for all the world (or at least web scrapers) to see. Yet I haven’t received any spam to that account (knock on wood).
So my question is the title of this post: Is email harvesting no longer an issue?
I don’t worry about it and our business emails that have been like that for years don’t get much spam, I think mostly cause gmail filters it all out before we get it.
I prefer to make it easy for my customers to contact me even if that makes the email scrape-able.
Probably has to do with who you host your email with and how much traffic you get.
I have a site with fairly decent organic traffic and made the mistake of publishing my email address. I got absolutely slammed with spam until I obfuscated it.
Your mileage may vary, especially if your email is going through something like Gmail that has pretty good spam filtering. I was using whatever crappy spam filtering backend Media Temple provided.
Thanks, you’re probably right. I just switched to Rackspace, and so far, so good.
As for traffic, so you’re saying (and I should have thought of this), if I put my email address in a Facebook post (for example), then I’ve significantly increased the chances of getting spammed. That makes sense. (That is what you’re saying, right?)
Yes that’s what I’m saying. In my experience a new site that doesn’t rank for anything wont likely be a target since these spam harvesting bots need a way of “discovering” your site to scrape.
It’s probably similar to comment spam. The higher the incoming traffic, the bigger the target for spam.