question about email id's?

Question

why do some people write their id as
xyz at yahoo dot com
i have noticed in several sites
instead of
[e-mail]

whnevr i copy such a email id i have to edit it and put it in proper format..

Answer 1

It's called address munging" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_munging ). Because there are "spambots" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spambot )that rove the internet looking for email addresses. it's really too easy to search a site and find all instances where a word is immediately before a @ and something looking like a .com or .net, etc is directly behind it.