" think the main problem here is that it seems to be HN'ers spamming other HN'ers."<p>Well (a) an HN'er is just someone who has filled in two text boxes. There is not even amoderator approval step to join HN and it is not like you have to have a certain amount of karma to see email addresses.  (b) (I could be wrong about this  but) you can see email addresses even when logged out if they are part of the "publicly exposed" part of the profile. So you don't need to be an HNer to harvest a good set of emails.<p>If I am wrong on (b) then maybe the moderators can do something about this, but I can't think what. Anyone can log in with pseudo name/password combo. quietly harvest all visible emails and hey presto targeted spam.