Adding @Milan @Nathan Sudds & @Kevin Bendixen in case they can advise on this

Hello @User32  

Once your email is collected by those crawlers it will be hard to defend from the spammy emails. 

What you can do is to block each incoming email (although they are often changed). Each incoming email will create a contact profile (lead) and on its profile in Intercom you have three dots and option to block.

You can also set Inbox rule / Workflow to autoclose the emails (conversations) coming from the email addresses / domains that spam you, so you do not even see them. 

Hope this helps. 

p.s. @Jennifer K  thanks for mention! :) 

Hi @Milan, thanks for the suggestion on how to block spammers once they get a hold of our email address. We were aware of Intercom’s block users/leads feature and are using it. But my question still is more about how to get our support email to users in a way that minimizes our receipt of spam in the first place. Even if my company didn’t take the best action in the first place, if you or anyone else happens to have any best practices on the best way to share a support email while avoiding spam, we’d be happy to change up what we are doing now. 

You should disclose your support email behind the user log in. 

So only on pages that are visible after log in. 

Also you can mention email on Intercom messenger, either as a let’s say widget on the home tab or within the bots conversations (i.e. usually I put the bot ending message in case the user reaches during out of office hours with email/phone).  

You can also mention it in the help articles and lock articles only for logged in users. 

Mention it in the greeting/welcome message (chat, email, banner), ending message of an initial product tour, etc...

Those are just some ideas, and as you can see they are all out of the reach of the crawlers.

@Milan thank you for these excellent ideas! I definitely can see us implementing some of them. One last question, if you (or anyone else reading this thread) care to weigh in. We are a tech company that has desktop and mobile applications so one of the most common, although not frequent issues, is from users who can’t log into the app due to password issues, user error, etc. So putting the support email in help articles that are visible only to users is a good idea to stop spammers, but then it leaves people whose very issue is logging in without support. Does anyone have any recommendations for how to our support email to this contingent of users? 

I’m sure you can put your support email somewhere in the Mobile app and that can not be crawled. Not sure what you mean by Desktop app (is it being installed or it is a web app where there is a log in screen which can be accessed by crawlers). But the rule of thumb is that on places that are accessible to crawlers try not to put the email, at least not as a text. Those are web pages and you can just leave them with Intercom messenger as an option to reach out to the support. 

You will not escape from crawlers and spammers, but at least you can make their work harder. :)