First of all, in this day and age, it’s unlikely that the spammers will not find my email address. That’s because they also install a lot of malware on vulnerable computers to harvest email addresses from. Since I can’t refrain from sending email to Windows users, and would rather not, I can never prevent spam entirely.

I deal with spam by filtering it on the client side. I’m using SpamAssassin to filter my email and so far it’s doing a very good job. Some spam still arrives at my inbox, but otherwise very little. There are several other open-source spam filters (and some non-open-source solutions), which you may wish to look at. GMail and other webmail services also do a good job in filtering spam (regardless of their other faults).

All of that put aside, I think that having a convenient “mailto:” link is recommended because people don’t need to go through inconvenient hoops to send you an email. I love receiving (good) email about my site, and I’d rather not throw away the baby along with the water, just because spammers may have an easier time harvesting my already public email address.

For more information, see my post to the “Joel on Software” forum about “Email at the bottom of every page”.