Why does simple email obfuscation work so well?

Question

For example replacing @ with at. At least one study demonstrated its effectiveness:

To our surprise, none of the crawlers that visited our departmental research and course and research web pages led to any spam on email addresses containing the at.

Another experiment demonstrated the same thing, showing that using at and dot reduced spam by two orders of magnitude.

The first study speculated that spammers obtain enough plain-text email addresses to ignore the obfuscated ones. But parsing at in addition to @ should be trivial. Why don't spammers account for such simple obfuscation?

Answer 1

I am no expert...but it intuitively makes sense that the @ symbol is much less commonly used in non-email-related speech. The @ sign is what set an email address apart from all the other text. If you simply use at, it blends in with normal English.

At is a pretty common word after all :P I'm sure its still possible to parse out the "at" version of an email, but just much more difficult of a regex.