Personal email addresses in posts

We had a case today where a poster put his email address in a post. This is highly discouraged, for the simple reason that the site is open to the public as requested by many users, and this means we are indexed by a lot of bots and crawlers such as Google, and I have no way of stopping malicious entities harvesting email addresses.

I’ll normally delete any such posts, to protect the posters from harm.

People may not have realized the cost of the open status is hundreds of bots sniffing around continuously.

Let me modify my statement. I am not going to delete valid posts just because they have a personal email address in them. I’ll PM the author and they can edit it out themselves. I typed in haste!