Definition
To publish email without inviting spam, do not put your personal inbox on the open web. Use a sift.mx handle with private forwarding, free trusted contacts, and a cover for unknowns.
Publishing personal email is a permanent free door
Scrapers and LLM agents collect addresses from sites, PDFs, GitHub, and press kits. Once your real inbox is public, filters are cleanup—not a gate. The address will be sold, guessed, and sprayed for years.
Obfuscation tricks (“name [at] domain”) buy less time than they used to. If humans can contact you, automated collectors usually can too.
Publish a gated handle instead
A sift handle is designed to be public. Behind it: verified forwarding, allowlists, and pay-to-deliver for strangers. Your real address stays private even when the handle is on every page of your site.
You stay findable for customers, press, and collaborators. You stop treating “public contact” as “unlimited free interruption.”
Still reachable for the right people
Customers and collaborators you trust never need to pay—whitelist them (and their domains) on day one. Unknowns who truly need you can pay a small cover. That is how you stay findable without feeding the free spam commons.
A practical publish checklist
Claim the handle and verify forwarding before you swap addresses. Allowlist known domains. Set a cover you would charge for a cold interrupt. Then replace personal email on the website, about page, and profiles—and leave the old address off new PDFs and decks.
If an old address must stay alive for legal notices, stop linking it and treat it as legacy. Move humans you care about onto the whitelist of the new handle.
What “without spam” really means
You will not get zero unwanted mail forever. You get fewer free attempts, a private destination, and a clear rule for strangers. That is the honest bar—not a magic filter that reads minds.
FAQ
What if someone already has my personal email?
You cannot un-leak an address. Stop publishing it going forward, allowlist people you still want free on sift, and route new public contact to the sift handle.
Will customers hate a cover?
Existing customers should be allowlisted. The cover is for strangers. Serious new leads can pay; spray bots usually will not.