Even if the email addresses can’t be removed, I was hoping they could at-least be automatically transformed into images or with “at” replacements in the address. Similar transformation is performed at other places on gossamer threads’ archives, it should be possible to do it in the “From” area of message bodies too.

In fact, the archives site even has the following in their FAQ:

Q. How do you protect users email addresses from harvesters? A. We make every effort to stop people from harvesting emails from the site. Currently, we encode, strip and transform all email addresses we can find (including parsing the message body for emails that show up in forwards). The only place the email address is viewable is by clicking on the user, and we embed the email in an image to prevent harvesting.

I tried contacting them through https://www.gossamer-threads.com/contact/, but didn’t get a reply. I was hoping if someone from the Wikimedia foundation contacted them, they would be more motivated to reply back.

Regards,