How can corresponding authors protect themselves from academic spam? Almost immediately after becoming a corresponding author, my academic email account quickly become inundated with unsolicited communications from predatory open access journals and “conferences.” My spam filter does a fairly good job, catching maybe 50-75% of these messages. But now that I will be using a new academic email address, I’ve thought about what I can do to prevent this problem from recurring. My idea is to publish the following text in the corresponding author field:


  Email: myname9@university.edu (remove digit “9” for correct email address)


Will journal editors let me do this? To my surprise, I’ve never seen another author try something similar. I’m confident that no one has (or will ever have) the “fake” email address indicated above, so there is no risk that the spam will go to an innocent third party.

Previous questions on Stack Exchange relate to email forwarding; none addresses the spam issue.
We all deal with this curse. Sad as it is, I suspect that your only option is to endure it -- my take is that papers ask you to provide an email address of record in some sort of official way, and playing games like the one you suggest would look inappropriate in this context.