I stopped being concerned about email harvesting years ago, I just simply leave the email on my website. Spam handling is okay enough, I guess.

But I like this review of techniques, even the simplest ones are very effective, that surprised me.

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jrmg an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I’ve had my email address in a `mailto:` link in plaintext on my then-web-site, now-blog, since the early 2000s, and spam is no real problem. There are a few spam messages in my spam mailbox per day.

Perhaps my provider’s just great at filtering spam - but I kind of doubt it’s better than the major players (for years I’ve used Zoho for email - and it’s ‘okay’ enough that it’s not worth switching).

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Yaggo 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Same here, the address will eventually leak some way anyway.

I never got SpamAssassin working very well, but since moving my email hosting to Apple (from my own server), spam has not been a problem.

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e40 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’m up to more than 1,500 spam emails a month, with my email on the corp website.

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GeoSys 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I agree that email addresses get leaked eventually.

However, LLMs are quite good at generating spam and I think soon will evade most filters.

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BorisMelnik an hour ago | parent | next [-]

you know what's funny is that llms are also good at detecting spam as they are generating it. I've got an automation that scores incoming emails and it's getting better and better each day (also more expensive haha)

	▲	SV_BubbleTime 19 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I can’t explain it well, but I think there is an asymmetric issue here… that the ability for an LLM to write a plausible email, and the ability for an LLM to detect that it’s spam are mismatched. Perhaps if you said the LLM had all your context and websearch. That it could know that a Penny Pollytree and Coco Co isn’t a real person, but… that just seems like burning a ton of coal to detect fraud where an LLM was able to easily come up with the fictitious spam cheaply.

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Gigachad 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I doubt it. Most of the signals spam filters use these days are reputation based. You have to build up your domain and IP reputation for a long time first.

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embedding-shape 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> You have to build up your domain and IP reputation for a long time first.

Or buy/rent domains/IPs that have good reputations, as there are services that specializes in just bringing up the reputation for stuff so they can sell it once "good". Same exists for user accounts for various platforms like reddit and so on.

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Gigachad 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure, you'd burn that reputation extremely fast as Google detects your sending patterns change and the first few users start reporting as spam.

	▲	embedding-shape an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> you'd burn that reputation extremely fast Yes, that is indeed the point of those; "build up reputation -> sell/rent -> someone uses it to burn reputation -> rinse and repeat".