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Especially obfuscations like "bob at gmail dot com". If I were a spambot I would just read until the first space and append "@gmail.com" and "@hotmail.com" and 5-6 other mail providers. This would break through 90% of people doing that, and they're high value targets too - they feel secure with their clever obfuscation and chances are their other anti-spam tools (and reflexes) are weaker.

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But you're not a spam bot author. Based on what I've seen, most spam bot authors are pretty bad programmers.

Also, I would debate that these are high value targets. I'd wager that people who go out of their way to obscure their addresses are much less likely to purchase fake pills or fall for a phishing email than the average user.

With your method, you would have to get an email address after every word: in your own words "i would just read until the first space and append". At the first space ("bob "), you have no indication this is a valid prefix of an email address.

Secondly, I don't see how bob is a high value target. Someone who knows what spam is, and knows what a spam bot is, and knows they want to obfuscate it, is probably not someone who would make a purchase if they did receive spam.

I think that's one reason spam bot crawlers don't try that hard to obfuscate addresses: the recipients are of less value than those unobfuscated.

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