"You seem to be very much intent on showing that this kind of behaviour is both to be expected"<p>Yes. If you put your email somewhere public you are certain to get spam. So yes it is to be expected.<p>"and acceptable"<p>No, it isn't a nice thing to happen to you but there is nothing that can be done about it once you've put your email id on a public page. So it is not acceptable, but it will happen anyway. I guess i am not surprised when it happens.<p>" will have to disagree about that."<p>shrug.<p>I guess I just don't get the sense of outrage about first putting an email id on a public, indexable, crawlable  web page and then groaning and moaning about nasty lowlifes sending you spam. This is like wandering around in dark alleys in shady areas  and then  being surprised about getting mugged. I agree it shouldn't happen and in an ideal world it wouldn't but it does.<p>If you don't want spam, don't expose your email id on the web. Or have an extra  spamtrap id if you must enter email ids into web forms. Obfuscate the id to throw off regex matchers.  Have a good spam filter. That's the state of play as of today.