Tuesday, January 22, 2008

My e-mail

A recent commenter has rightfully wondered why my Blogger profile shows no e-mail address. The reason is that I have bitter experience with displaying such addresses in public. My office e-mail was included in the abstracts of some my articles uploaded in PubMed. This is a good thing, it allows colleagues to e-mail me and request reprints from the articles (the standard way a researcher keeps himself informed about other people's works in his field). However, it had an unpleasant side-effect - spammers picked my e-mail. The result: when at work, I receive every day about 30-40 e-mails trying te sell me Viagra or weight-losing medicine. My colleagues with works published in PubMed are in the same situation. In fact, when we are at work and an hour passes without a spam e-mail dropping, we know that there is a technical problem with the server. And about a third of the spam messages carry viruses. I think that the server has to filter the spam and the other virus-containing messages. Now, everything that goes into the server reaches the users, and we are let to fight the viruses as we can.
I'll display my e-mail address, not in my profile but in this post, and in somewhat disguised form, hoping the spammers will overlook it. Here it is: mayamarkov at gmail dot com.

2 comments:

Estranged said...

I'm not afraid of publishing my GMail adress anywhere, because GMail has an almost perfect spam filter. 300 spam messages stay captured in it right now. I can look at them if I want, but if I don't, it feels as if they don't exist. In such a situation I can only say to spammers "Bring it on!".

Maya M said...

Thank you! So I needn't worry about showing my G-mail address.