Address Munging - Disadvantages

Disadvantages

Disguising addresses makes it more difficult for people to send e-mail to each other. Many see it as an attempt to fix a symptom rather than solving the real problem of e-mail spam, at the expense of causing problems for innocent users.

The use of address munging on Usenet is contrary to the recommendations of RFC 1036 governing the format of Usenet posts, which requires a valid e-mail address be supplied in the From: field of the post. In practice, few people follow this so strictly.

Disguising e-mail addresses in a systematic manner (for example, userdomaincom), offers little protection. For example, such addresses can be revealed through a simple Google Search.

Any impediment reduces the users willing to take the extra trouble to email the user. In contrast, well maintained email filtering on the user's end does not drive away potential correspondents. Then again, no spam filter is 100% immune to false positives, and the same potential correspondent that would have been deterred by address munging may instead end up wasting time on long letters that will merely disappear in junk mail folders.

For commercial entities, maintaining contact forms on web pages rather than publicizing Email addresses may be one way to ensure that incoming messages are relatively spam-free yet do not get lost. In conjunction with CAPTCHA fields, spam on such comment fields can be reduced to effectively zero, except that non-accessibility of CAPTCHAs bring exactly the same deterrent problems as address munging itself.