discuss Why websites hide e-mail addresses?

[Dr. A]

Official e-mail addresses on websites are meant for official communication. Why then many websites hide their e-mail addresses and restrict communication if they had nothing to hide? What exactly are they trying to protect. Most of the phone numbers on the websites are also either non-functional or takes you to a voice-service that does not allow elaboration of the grievances. If it was a personal e-mail id then yes, that is understandable, however, why hide the official one too?

 

[Cpvr]

Generally websites hide their email addresses to keep the spam level to a minimum. If your email addresses is opened, bots are able to send a bunch of emails to it. Which is why a lot of owners use contact forms that include a captcha.

 

[Yama]

They don't restrict communication. One basic rule about running a website is that it should also include contact address and most websites allow you to contact the owner. They do hide email address but you can easily contact them.

 

[Harsh World]

Generally websites hide their email addresses to keep the spam level to a minimum. If your email addresses is opened, bots are able to send a bunch of emails to it. Which is why a lot of owners use contact forms that include a captcha.

I've put it as an image before, but reluctant to put it in an image now. AI is so powerful that it could probably read the website and still extract the email address from the image, to then be added to a spam list.

Operating as a small business has its drawbacks, as you can't sift through 1000s of emails to find the very important one.

Larger corporate sites definitely have email addresses for specific contact reasons, but I'm sure they have a pretty hefty backend and filtering system to get legitimate emails through. I believe a contact form with CAPTCHA is sufficient.

Using Google as the mail provider on the domain is a good way to manage spam, but it's not perfect. And, you might have to make compromises.

If you can't afford separate email boxes at Google ($6/month each), you could have admin@domain.com and dmca@domain.com for $12/month, or you could use admin@domain.com as the primary and show DMCA requests as admin.dmca@domain.com for $6. However, if you miss something, you might have to cross t's and dot i's by searching Google Mail for to:admin.dmca@domain.com to find the DMCA requests.

 

[Zani]

Generally websites hide their email addresses to keep the spam level to a minimum. If your email addresses is opened, bots are able to send a bunch of emails to it. Which is why a lot of owners use contact forms that include a captcha.

Great idea for that. I won't be comfortable being on a platform where my email address is exposed because it will mean my privacy ends up being exposed to a lot of bots and rude persons.