Large-scale spam is pretty well filtered these days. But smaller-scale (especially B2B) cold inquiries to curated lists of interested parties are still very much a thing. And sites like https://hunter.io/ absolutely do use publicly available search results (including forums) to find which of many permutations might be someone's email address. They may not be sophisticated enough yet to use [dot] as part of those permutations, but it's only a matter of time.

François from Hunter here.

Hunter does indeed search the entire public web for professional email addresses, following search engines specifications like robots.txt.

However, we do not try to reverse obfuscations as it is a clear sign the owner doesn't want the email address to be collected by automatic means. So even basic obfuscations like [dot] are enough to prevent the collection.

We also let the email addresses owners modify or delete the data we index about them: https://hunter.io/claim.

I doubt there’s an email scraper that hasn’t added logic to replace [at] with @ etc. - so most of these obfuscations are absolutely useless too.

I put a unique email address in my hn profile at one point and got spam sent to it after a few months

I had my unobfuscated email in my HN profile for no more than 2 weeks, and received a couple of cold mails in turn (to this date, actually).

I imagine it's still a thing, but spam filters have solved most of the problem.

Sadly yes - for major company emails at least.