Mike said:
My experience is that it will always get worse & worse until you are forced
to change it (and send out a change notice to all your contacts, etc.)
I've been posting - prolifically, in some years - to Usenet since
1991, using non-obfuscated email addresses. I use those same addresses
on numerous email lists, many of which have open archives.
Those accounts don't receive a bothersome amount of spam, and what
they do receive is almost entirely caught by Thunderbird's Bayesian
filter, which I trained implicitly (ie, by marking the occasional spam
message as spam until the rate of false negatives dropped close to
zero). I haven't had the filter return a false positive in months or
years - it happens so rarely that I only check the junk messages once
a week or so.
Obfuscation is bothersome, and many people find it rude. Filtering is
the graceful solution; it lets the owner of the account assume a small
burden, rather than putting a more tiresome one on correspondents.