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It's probably earnest. An amazingly large number of people think that making your personal e-mail address public is somehow unwise.

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I mean, it does slightly increase your rate of spam. I have a private email that I only give out to RL people that has never received a spam message.

Wow I love this idea! Can't believe I haven't thought of it

Having a 'spam email' that you use to sign up for stuff and a separate one for non-automated communication only is definitely a good idea.

If you can keep your email address off the front page of the internet, I figure that will help reduce spam.

At this point, that's like trying to reduce flooding by not dumping a bucket into the river. There's so much spam out there that your only hope is effective filtering.

Oh, I've still got filtering, but it reduces how good/aggressive my filtering has to be.

It is indeed very difficult to keep ALL your email addresses from being publicly listed, so I use GMail accounts for the ones plastered all over the web, and let GMail handle the spam.

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