Here is a link to someone who ran the same test as I did: http://blog.macromates.com/2006/obfuscating-email-addresses/

His findings were 286 to 1. That is 286 spam messages were received on the un-encoded email and only 1 to the encoded email. So it seems that other people are also having great results with this approach.

I hope that helps,
Wes

Sorry about not posting the results… I totally forgot about it. I just looked at the inboxes for both accounts and they each had only one spam message that were identical for both inboxes. I would imagine that someone manually sent that email.

I looked into why both accounts were lacking any spam and it turns out, that although I turned off the spam protection for those individual accounts, I had completely forgot that I had server wide spam protection turned on. So the test was doomed to fail from day one. At least I know my spam settings are working!

Although I can attest to my obscure_email method above working on some of our commercial projects that are running on different servers. Hope the article helped anyways.

Wes