SPAM SPAM SPAM!

Nope. You do not have to publish your email address online anywhere. That is what contact forms are for. I never publish my email address online anywhere because you are only inviting spam by doing so.

Unfortunately the email harvesting bots are much smarter than that. They are programmed to know that people try and hide their email address in those type of formats so they would immediately see your email address as xxx@xxx.com and you are then added to their list of email addresses to spam. The only way to stop your address being found is to not publish it online anywhere, ever.

Yes, people will get the odd spam email but once your email address is published online somewhere you will only invite a whole load of more spam. The more freely available you make your email address, the more spam you will get.

P.S. For your future reference when responding to more than one post just use the 'Multiquote' feature found below each post. Click the 'Multiquote' button below each post you want to reply to and then click on 'Post Reply' right down the bottom. It just gets very hard to follow conversation when you reply to everyone in separate posts and inflates the thread unnecessarily.

Russ, that looks interesting.

Question, what do you do about mail that it thinks is spam
but isn't? Can you still get it?

My junk folder is filled with mail I never said was junk
but it thinks it is.

There is mail I want to get, but it gets marked as spam.

thanks

Hey Karen,

I did not know about the SPF record nor did my ISP suggest it. Thanks

Spam Assassin done.
Mail filters done.
Junk mail training done.

View the source of junk messages. Look at the SA notes, and the score. It'll show something like ""URL listed in the DBL blocklist". Now go to User Level Filtering (or Account Filtering) and make a rule to discard messages with that problem. It'll take some more spam to get the rules down, but within a week, it'll all be gone. Google just puts such things in a junk folder -- it doesn't discard it, as it should.

I'd also let SA discard anything above 10 in the SA settings. (It makes a rule in User/Account Level Filtering)

Using Google is unnecessary, a quite frankly NOT suggested if you like to backup your own IMAP accounts. Some people are lazy, and won't do things like this. They use Google or whatever is easy or free (Cloudflare, WordPress plugins, etc), but don't think about the negatives of that method. Too many lazy folks on this forum.