Perhaps if people are obfuscating or not directly giving you their e-mail address it is because they don't want you to know what it is. Understandably, if someone doesn't want to talk to you and you want to talk to them, that can be frustrating. But that's their right.
Fair enough, certainly. But, in my head, if they have a website, they're doing so for someone to read it. If they *only* wanted people to read it, they'd write a book, where interaction is difficult. Interaction is implied when you publish something (non-anon) on the *inter*net.
Your point also suggests that one should have an individual choice, upon signup, on whether his address were obfuscated in an archive (or, more sensibly, on live sends too, such that private archives wouldn't have it either). I guess I'd "support" an opt in feature for that, although I'm conflicted in so-doing (*choice* is something I never want removed, and it'd be an individuals' choice, not a forced capability applied to every one); I'd certainly opt out of it.
this mailing list. (a couple others are similar, but not mine). That means that the 2-3 spam messages I get per day on this relatively new address are from this mailing list.
I'm not sure I fully agree, though it is certainly a possibility. You're telling me that you implicitly trust every person you've sent a personal email to to be expert enough to secure their machine from harvesters? Or that every one of our subscribers on this list have pure machines that couldn't have third partied your email to someone, through no fault of the public archive?
If you go to mail.wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org and sign in to wikitech-l, you can access a list of Wikitech-l subscribers. A poor attempt
I agree that is not a good idea. I may sub to incest@, but if I never post there because I don't want people to know, giving away my address, either monetarily or freely purposes, is bad.