How come the email addresses don't work?

So, why do the email addresses on this website look strange and don't work properly? The one-word answer: SPAM.

There are some nasty critters out there on the web, automated sniffing systems which look on websites for email addresses. They're simple, most of them, they just look for "@" characters. When they find one, they look to see if the surrounding text comprises a legal email address. When the answer is yes, they store the email address away. Later, they use it to spam you, or sell it to someone who will.

As a result, our email addresses are "encrypted" with respect to these simple spamming address filtering programs, using, of course, an "encryption algorithm" that you, as a human, can easily decipher. Just replace the silly characters with the "@" and dot (".").

Example: If you find fred at birfle dot com, replace it with fred@birfle.com .

Hope that helps. (By the way, if you're interested in the syntax rules behind mail, they're on the web in two RFC (Request for Comments - the internet's standards mechanism) items: RFC 821, RFC 822. Also see this email history.)