Some people consider that spammers have crawlers scanning the web for email addresses to add to their lists, since I guess that addresses shared publicly might

Some people consider that spammers have crawlers scanning the web for email addresses to add to their lists, since I guess that addresses shared publicly might be more likely to be active and respond to emails from unknown contacts. That's why it's common for people to describe their email address instead of writing it outright. You'll see stuff like "my username (at) example (dot) com" and other more creative obfuscations instead of just writing "foobar@example.com".