Removing the @ and . characters from email addresses

More and more people on biggie seem to be removing these symbols and replacing them with (at) and (dot) or something similar.
How much can this achieve against bots that crawl for email addresses since you need to register to view these forums?

I can understand people doing this to dissuade human email harvesters, but is it really nessecary? Also, I've read alot of bots are so advanced now they can get past this trick.

I get the feeling most people do this simply because they've seen others doing it and have no idea of the actual logic behind it.

It works to a point as thins like at and dot turn up in normal langauge there would be vast amounts of useless data to sift through.

I agree that it's almost useless to use at and dot, even stupid software can get around that easily. On biggie you need to register, but it'd be easy to register then have a bot present the cookie to gain access, so it's not stupid to do it on biggie.

What's a better was to obfusicate (sp?) your email address? How about

commando # email ^ com?
commando (at) email , com

The only issue is stupid people who can't work out what the real email is.

the best bet is to have two email addresses, one for public use, and one for your friends. The important thing is to NEVER put your public one on the web anywhere (or subscribe to mailing lists, etc.). Ask your friends to use the BCC field when doing a mass email, and not to give out your private address without asking.

Even if your friends are stupid, you should reduce the amount of spam you get. But it's almost impossible to completely prevent spam, although you can filter most of it out. I get maybe 1 spam a month (if that) on my work email account (mainly thanks to spam assassin).

I will generally put my email address as 'harvey at biggie'. People would know what I mean and I don't think it would be picked up as it is just normal language with nothing to indicate it is an email address. I would assume that most bots or whatever trawling for addresses would just go for the obvious email addresses.