Spam and Email

I commented on an entry in Chip's blog, which I'd like to preserve here.
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In my mind, right now I'm weighing the consequences of lots of unwanted mail vs. the benefit of having an open and clear conduit for people to reach me.

Doing the blog thing is an experiment in personal PR.  Part of that is making myself easily available for networking opportunities (i.e. one click for email between potential clients and me)

I have a reasonably strong system in place for handling my constantly filling inbox: spam busting: SpamAssassin + Cloudmark + Outlook Filters.

I don't get false positives very often, and when I do, it's almost always newsletters or digests that I subscribe to.

More importantly: there's inbox handling.  I'm proud to say that right now, my inbox has zero messages in it (even though I probably get about 200 a day).  Dealing with the messages you get (by either deleting, responding with one sentance, or putting on the pile of Todos) creates a state of simplicity that's ramped up my productivity big time.

I'm blabbering.

At any rate, right now I have the "scraper-proof" email address on my blog (even though those are getting circumvented, now), but I think on principle I will switch it to a clickable link.

I'll deal with the mountains of spam as they come.

Another step is to publish my cell-phone number and always-on gps locator (so you can find me at all time), but that's an entirely different beast, privacy issues aside.