Fear not
One of the reasons people moderately aware of spam do not comment on weblogs is because they fear that their email addresses are picked-up by bots and end-up getting spammed. This is partly true since there are a lot of weblog applications that do nothing to protect the entered email addresses of visitors when they fill-in the address boxes prior to commenting.
In earlier days, people were worried about writing on newsgroups with their real addresses because of this menace. Now, that fear is spreading to blogosphere as well. There are many that have an opinion to add to a post, but do not do so because of spam.
To blog owners: If you value your readers’ privacy, make an effort to protect their identity and the information they share with you when they provide you their valuable feedback on your posts. Choose a blog software or service that provides some protection to your visitors. If your software does not, then don’t make entering the email address a mandatory requirement.
To blog readers: If you need to enter your email address, enter with a remove enclosure embedded in the address (something like yourid@delete-this-first-something.com where only humans can read and remove the enclosure to reply to you; In addition, if you have a Gmail account, use that because it’s good at trapping spam; or use an email address specifically for commenting if you like).
If you comment on a WordPress powered blog, your email address is well protected and you can enter it without an enclosure. WordPress neither displays nor embeds your email address on web/blog pages (even if you don’t fill in your website address; view web/blog page source, if still in doubt). An entered email address in WordPress goes directly into the MySQL database that has multiple layers of protection and is visible only to the owner and no one else, not even bots.
Hope that helps. Do comment and add your opinions where you have a say, because opinions make a blog truly conversational.
Many newsgroup archiving systems (mailing lists likewise) omit E-mails from the headers, but some E-mail software quotes E-mail addresses in the body. Spam protection is still immature and can rarely be trusted.
May 31, 05 at 10:17As a blogger and a blog reader, I always prefer if blog authors put up a message next the email field, something like “will not be published”. I’ve never really hesitated to not comment at a blog due to worries about spam because I have two email addresses, one which I use at blogs, that email address is where I get most of my mail and the one that I check the most (though it only gets around 2-3 spam messages per day) and another which gets none, it is a gmail address that one, I very rarely ever give to very many people.
May 31, 05 at 22:34