I took a funny 'SEO Quiz' today. It asked ten questions and told me that with my score of 6/10, I'm an SEO Technician. While I could go into great detail on why I differ with the answers they felt were correct, the funnier thing that made me want to jump over here and post was the following quote:
"john[at]site.com is the accepted spam-free way of writing e-mails."
Ring problematic to anyone else? How dumb do they think spammers are? The instant an approach to hiding email addresses from spammers becomes "accepted," it becomes part of the next update patch to all the spam harvester programs. I'm almost tempted to write one myself, just to look for anything[at]anything.com.
This is another small area in which security through obscurity is actually the best approach. Come up with your own, unique way to hide your email address. Put something like myemail*at* sitedotcom. It doesn't have to be brilliant or beautiful, just different enough from what everyone else is doing that it doesn't match the patterns plugged into the harvester programs.
Security through genetic diversity has worked well for the human race. There's no reason it shouldn't help software. Small differences, variety ensures that no one attack will take down everything. A key part of defense in depth should be obscurity!