I have two people I designed web sites for in the last year and I put both their email addresses in the footer and neither one of their accounts has received a single spam message in all of that time (not even something dropped into the Spam folder). Both sites are popular and have thousands of visitors and get scraped by every search engine and AI bot you can think of.
Interesting. Maybe footer emails tend to be support contact addresses rather than personal inboxes. Otherwise I’d find that discrepancy very surprising.
