There are bots that scrap for emails on the monthly who's hiring etc posts. Made the mistake once of posting my email in the original formatting, got some funny scam emails. So they are still around
Do things like [myhnusername] @ gmail.com Which implies to replace [myhnusername] with their HN username. I used to scrape - this is not worth the time to fix or patch for.
For most people, it doesn't matter at all if their email address is posted publicly like that. Any email address that someone has used to sign up for services for years is going to have been leaked anyway. There's very little value to just a plain email address with no password, no context, etc.
If you posted your (let's say) Gmail address on HN, the spam level of your inbox wouldn't change. Gmail might work a bit harder filtering out some spam, but it would be lowest-common-denominator stuff that they easily recognize.
Maybe they don’t want those email addresses anyway. People who are aware of spambots may not be the ripest targets for spam, so it’s not worth the cost of targeting them.
I can't see that being that difficult personally. You are already searching for string + @ + string + .com, string + at + string + dot + com isn't exactly rocket science.
I have seen some people doing things like //\\//name\///at\\\///domain///\\com which might be more unexpected, and therefore might help. But any practice if it becomes common will be seen through.
They haven't figured out what spaces are. I have just been putting a space before and after the @ for years. No spam problems. My guess is that spaces are so prolific that having to parse out every space in a page and then whether they are near special characters or keywords just isn't worth the trouble.
