[betterunix]

Does it matter? Email addresses are harvested by spammers all the time. The key piece of the puzzle now is that spam filtering is advanced enough that we do not need to care. I almost never see spam in my inbox, and I almost never see ham in my junk folder.

[karangoeluw]

Well it might not matter to you directly, but those spam filters do need this kind of research.

What else is really important is that we, as webmaster/web programmers, should be able to protect users' email addresses from being spammed away. Many people I know use catch-all emails while signing up for websites so they can see what site sent any spam. If a site did, the trust is abased.