I know every one seems to do it on here since the hijacking last year, but does it actually help? Is it just to stop people drag and dropping your email address? Even i've done it and i dont know why!!

Any email addy gathering software worth its salt will easily strip these out. Personally, I reckon it's just paranoia. I used to have my email address as a link on each post and I am not overly-spammed.

As per druidh, it's to try & stop bits from scouring forums & harvesting addresses fo spam.

You can always upload a jpg of your email addy & insert that.

I've done it. It's pointless though, anyoNE CAPABLE of writing an email harvesting program has by definition already done the legwork and used the functions required to parse the text and replace characters as required. Ultimately I've no idea why I did it. I'm going to re-do it as something a bit more difficult to strip.