From Heinz Tschabitscher,
Your Guide to Email.
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Spammers use special programs that extract email addresses from chat rooms, web sites — forums and comment sections of blogs in particular — and Usenet postings.

Disguise Your Email Address in Newsgroups, Forums, Blog Comments, Chat

To avoid ending on a spammer's mailing list when you post to a web forum or a newsgroup, you can

• disguise your email address by inserting something obvious into it.

If my email address is me@example.com, I can modify it to read me@EXAdelete_thisMPLE.com, for example. I will not get spam at that email address since all messages to it will bounce, but people who want to send me an email can still do so after they remove "delete_this" from the address.

Obscuring your email address does make sending mail a bit more difficult. But this is not always a disadvantage.

Automatic Email Address Obfuscation

Email address encoding tools take the obfuscation a step further. While primarily designed for use on web sites, you can also use addresses encoded with such tools on web forums or web-based usenet, for example.