Out of curiosity, I downloaded a bot that was designed to harvest e-mail addresses and other text from web sites. The bots look at the source code of the page and pull out any string that looks like an e-mail address, regardless of whether it is a mailto: link, the link text or even plain text. The bot I played with was even smart enough to drop added nospam text and could convert "something at somewhere dot com" into "something@somewhere.com". The bot was also able to crawl SSL pages. The only method I have seen that worked against the bot was putting the e-mail address into an image that is not linked, or using a secure contact form.

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The best way to learn anything, is to question everything.