A lot of people use fake, or altered, email addresses on comments threads, presumably because they want to avoid being flooded with spam. But it turns out that these are actually not that vulnerable.

Ever since Crooked Timber started I’ve been using my crookedtimber email address as my email address on all comments boards. And as far as I can tell I’ve never got a single piece of spam sent to that address. So just using a real address does not mean you’ll automatically get spammed.

To be sure, I also always leave a website address, usually “Crooked Timber”:http://www.crookedtimber.org, so the email address doesn’t show up on default settings. And maybe if I didn’t do that I’d be getting spam because of it. So all I can say with any confidence is that leaving real email addresses on MT comments boards, plus leaving a web address, doesn’t seem to lead to spam.