I do this too, and despite what other replies here suggest, anecdotally it does seem to work. My approach is a little more convoluted than simply document.writ

I do this too, and despite what other replies here suggest, anecdotally it does seem to work. My approach is a little more convoluted than simply document.write or something like that, so maybe that matters. I get crawled by bad bots all the time, but these addresses never seem to get spammed. The same is not true for addresses displayed in plain-text somewhere. My explanation has always been that there are so many plain-text addresses on the web that it isn't necessary to add JavaScript parsing logic to most harvesters. Much like car alarms or door locks--you don't need to make them unbreakable, simple harder to get at than the one next door. Someday we may need to start displaying email addresses as (or behind) captchas.